Jeff Tambellini remembers the night before the 2006-07 regular-season finale, as the Islanders sat around the TV at a Newark hotel to watch “Hockey Night in Canada.”

In order to have a chance to get into the playoffs the next day, the Islanders needed the Maple Leafs to beat the Canadiens. Then they needed to beat the Devils to keep Toronto out.

The Maple Leafs opened a 3-1 lead, blew it to go down 5-3, then stormed back to win 6-5. The door was open.

“As a young player watching some of our leaders … it’s such a veteran group and just watching their emotions go as we were watching Toronto-Montreal, and then for it to finish and now we have a chance to get back in,” Tambellini, a left-winger on that team, told The Post Wednesday afternoon. “Me as a player, that’s really all you can ask for, is to control your own destiny on the last day of the season.”

Sound familiar?

The current group of Islanders, who channeled the 2007 team in clinching a playoff berth on the last day of the season with a 4-2 victory over the Canadiens on Wednesday, was scattered at their respective homes on Tuesday night as the Penguins lost to the Blackhawks. Some of them got to their televisions. All of them heard about it.

“I decided not to tune into that one,” Noah Dobson said. “But I was checking the score periodically and I turned it on. … It’s an opportunity where, yesterday in the morning you wake up and it’s like, oh, you’re a little down. Obviously, to see that kinda gives you a little energy and life.”

“I watched a movie (“American Hustle”) downstairs,” Islanders coach Lane Lambert said, “and my wife watched the game upstairs and sent me updates.”

Like in 2007, they got to the rink on the last day of the season knowing they would get into the playoffs with a win.

The Islanders of 16 years ago had gone through what Richard Park would, on Wednesday night, call an “unorthodox” season, starting with Garth Snow replacing Neil Smith as general manager just 41 days after Smith was hired and including a late-March injury to goaltender Rick DiPietro that seemed to spell doom for the team’s playoff chances.

As the stretch run unfolded, with every game being a must-win, injuries dictated that Wade Dubielewicz was in nets. And, heading into Game 82 in New Jersey, Dubielewicz had won the Islanders three straight games, with the best yet to come.

The Devils, who had already locked up their playoff seeding, sat Martin Brodeur for just the fourth time that season, and Park scored twice to give the Islanders a 2-0 lead early in the third. But the lead wouldn’t last.

“There’s a buzz in the building ’cause it means so much to our team,” Tambellini said. “We had a lot of fans that night in New Jersey, and then we get up [2-0] and now we’re hanging on. And you can feel when a team’s hanging on, and we get down to that last minute and they score and tie it, and you can just feel the life kind of come out of the group a little bit.”

One point would not be enough for the Islanders. And the game would soon go into a shootout.

That was where Dubielewicz became an Islanders folk hero.

On the bench, the Islanders knew that Dubielewicz’s go-to move in a shootout was the poke check. They’d seen him do it in practice. But to pull it out with the season on the line was another matter entirely.

“Honestly, it was the most annoying thing ever as a shooter to come down and have this little, I don’t want to say a dinky poke check, but you can kind of stomach when the goalie makes a save on you,” Park told The Post. “A poke check, it’s not a great feeling, but he was really good at it.”

Dubielewicz stopped Brian Gionta with a poke check. Then he did the same thing to Sergei Brylin.

“I would imagine it was pretty loud after Dubielewicz poke-checked Sergei,” Zach Parise, who scored for the Devils in the shootout, told The Post. “I’m sure it was pretty loud.”

Indeed, the video confirms his recollection.

“Those are the moments that makes our sport, in my opinion — being a little biased — the best sport out there,” Park said. “You just can’t predict, and as much as you want a storybook ending every time in your favor, things don’t [always] work out like that.”

Want to catch a game? The Islanders schedule with links to buy tickets can be found here.

Sixteen years later, though, the Islanders got their storybook ending again.

Mathew Barzal (suspected knee) and Alexander Romanov (upper body) both skated on their own ahead of Wednesday’s game, with Romanov having first gotten on the ice Tuesday following his injury nearly two weeks ago in Tampa.

The good news for the Islanders is that they now have at least four days between games, as the playoffs won’t start until Monday, with the potential for Game 1 of their series against the Bruins or Hurricanes to be Tuesday.

(On a scheduling note: The Boston Marathon is Monday. Whether that makes the Bruins more or less likely to be hosting a playoff game that night is up to your interpretation).

The Islanders have been extremely guarded about injuries and personnel decisions all year, and will only be more tight-lipped in the playoffs. Asked about Barzal’s availability for Game 1 on Wednesday night, Lambert said: “He’s still day to day, so we don’t know yet. We’ll know a little bit more as we go along.”

Translation: The Islanders are not about to publicly reveal anything here.

• Eighty-one games of competition isn’t much, but Wednesday was, by a large margin, the best atmosphere in the short history of UBS Arena.

• Something I’ve been wondering: If you gave the Islanders the choice between Barzal or Romanov returning for the playoffs, would they have to pick Romanov? The way his absence has unsettled the Isles in the defensive zone and destabilized them on the back end is stark. But then again, Barzal is Barzal, and his return is the power play’s best chance of regaining competency.

• If Barzal isn’t back for Game 1 of the playoffs, it probably will and should be Josh Bailey on Bo Horvat’s right side. Bailey’s game on Wednesday was not all too noticeable, but he’s played in the postseason before and knows how to play mistake-free hockey in these situations. Plus, his scoring output is 60 percent higher per 60 minutes than Simon Holmstrom’s in terms of total points.

• An up-and-down season for Noah Dobson was fairly well encapsulated on Wednesday. A defensive-zone giveaway along the wall led directly to Rem Pitlick’s goal late in the first. But by the end of the night, Dobson had a pair of assists.

• On a related note, it will be interesting to see how much Lambert rides Adam Pelech and Ryan Pulock in the playoffs, especially if Romanov is not yet back. Scott Mayfield led the Isles in ice time on Wednesday with 25:53, so Lambert does not seem to be quite there yet as far as using his top pair so much.