There was no way to watch, unless you were one of the 17,500 people lucky enough to have tickets for that Friday evening, to be there when the puck dropped at 9 o’clock, to still be there 2 ¹/₂ hours later when the last great intramural New York sports rivalry was born. 

Maybe you were one of the alternately lucky ones whose house was wired for HBO, so you also had MSG Network in its infancy. Most didn’t know anyone like that. So when the Islanders faced the Rangers in Game 3 of the 1975 preliminary round of the NHL playoffs, it was WMCA radio all the way, Dom Valentino and Bob Lawrence on the call. 

That was April 11, 1975. Fifty years ago Friday. 

It was your own imagination that put the pieces together around 11:30 or so, long past bedtime, shortly after the Islanders somehow blew a 3-0 third-period lead: Jude Drouin winning the overtime faceoff, pushing the puck to defenseman Bert Marshall, who slid it to his blue-line partner Dave Lewis, who dumped it into the Rangers’ zone.