The next Islanders Vs Stars game carried a different feel because Mikko Rantanen was not in the lineup. The Dallas Stars forward had been injured at the Olympics while playing for Finland, ruling him out of the rematch and removing the player whose earlier hit had shaped so much of the discussion around this matchup.
That earlier meeting came in November of last year, when Rantanen drove Alexander Romanov face-first into the boards with a hit from behind in a Stars-Islanders game. He was handed a game misconduct for boarding, and the incident became the background to the next meeting between the teams.
The hit that set the tone
The context matters because this was always going to be viewed through that lens. Rantanen and Alexander Romanov were at the centre of the previous flashpoint, and the Stars and Islanders game from November of last year left a clear mark on the rivalry.
Patrick Roy was no longer behind the Islanders bench for the rematch, but the memory of that hit still lingered. Roy’s reaction at the time captured the temperature of the moment, with the message clear enough even in paraphrase: you are not going to finish that game without consequences.
A rematch without the central figure
In the end, the next Dallas Stars and New York Islanders game did not include Rantanen at all. His absence changed the shape of the contest before the puck even dropped, because the player most associated with the previous incident was unavailable after suffering the injury at the Olympics.
That does not erase what happened in November of last year, but it does alter the immediate storyline. The Islanders still had the backdrop of the Romanov incident, while the Stars had to move forward without the man at the heart of it.
For a matchup built on memory as much as momentum, that was the key development. The rematch was still there, but the on-ice edge that Rantanen might have brought to it was not.
