UNIONDALE, N.Y. -- It was a bittersweet night in a season that promises quite a few more melancholy moments for Islanders fans, who didn't seem to have their usual over-the-top venom for the Rangers at the start of Tuesday's game, even if this regular-season clash was perhaps the last game ever between them at the old barn, if the playoffs fail to bring them back together.

The Isles were in first place, just ahead of the Rangers. The Isles won this year's head-to-head series 3-2 despite how this game turned out.

So why the smattering of empty seats well into the second period? Was it the usual traffic snarl out on I-495 or the Meadowbrook Parkway? Why the slow way the crowd seemed to warm to the game even though the Isles outplayed the Rangers in the opening period, the first meeting between these two teams since a wild, frantic, 6-5 Rangers win here nearly a month ago that many of the players called one of the best NHL games they'd ever played in?

A dreary, steady rain fell all night, cramping the usual tailgating outside the arena. Was that it?

Or was it because the Islanders' long goodbye from their 43-year-old home is starting to sink in?

"It's sad -- it really breaks my heart that they're leaving here," says 58-year season-ticket holder Michael Niciforo, who was wearing a Bryan Trottier jersey and sitting in the lower bowl of the Coliseum with his 24-year-old son Steven. "I think there is a realization the end is coming -- just a general sense of foreboding. It's been hanging over everything all season. But it's getting stronger now [with just 13 regular-season games to go]. Everyone talks about the last game here, when it's going to be over. And how we don't want it to end."

For many lifelong Islanders fans, seeing their team move -- if only 25 miles west -- is hard to stomach. Kathy Kmonicek/AP Photo

Niciforo said when Steven was born, he dressed him in an Islanders jersey when he was still in his crib. He smiles and says he told all three of his children as they were growing up that they could be anything they wanted to be -- "but you can't be a Rangers fan." When Steven got older, the two of them watched tapes of the glory days Islanders teams together, and Steven memorized facts about those teams until "he knew them better than me."

A few years ago when the Isles finally made it back to the playoffs for a one-and-done stay, Steven turned to his father with tears in his eyes and said, "Dad, I finally now know what it was like for you here during all those playoff years."

"And that brought tears to my eyes," the elder Niciforo says. "For a lot of people here, following this team has been a way of life."

The Isles are as unique to the Long Island market as the NBA's Kings are to Sacramento, the Thunder are to Oklahoma City or the Packers are to Green Bay. Once the New York Jets abandoned nearby Hofstra University as their practice facility, the Islanders really became the only pro game around. And when they leave after this season for Brooklyn's Barclays Center, there is no reason to believe big-time pro sports will ever be back this way again.

"I'm going to take my seat after the last game here -- I already have the tools," says 19-year Islanders season-ticket holder Lawrence Marasco, a pharmaceutical salesman who grew up in nearby Seaford, New York.

Marasco returns from his current home in Dallas for four months every year to attend about 30 Islanders games a season with his dad, same as they have since Marasco was 5 years old.

Marasco, like so many Isles fans, stuck with the team in all the lean years when they were one of the most lampooned teams in pro sports between their dynastic run in the early 1980s and now. For a long time, players didn't want to play here. One galling roster move or bust season followed another. The NHL very nearly flubbed and sold the team at one point to a flimflam man named John Spano, who ended up in prison. Local politicians dithered and dallied on green-lighting the Lighthouse development project until owner Charles Wang hemorrhaged so much money he finally said enough and sold the team to the owners who are taking it to Brooklyn.

During many of those years, the only respite for Isles fans were those few games a year when the Rangers came to their place or the Islanders went to Madison Square Garden.

The Isles, even more than the Rangers, played those games with a passion and fury, as if they were their playoffs. Isles fans used to love being able to answer the Rangers' fans chants of "Potvin sucks!" with sing-song taunts of "1940" until the Rangers finally broke their drought and won the Stanley Cup in 1994, led by Mark Messier. Following the Isles -- who picked up the nickname The Fish Sticks the years their seafaring man logo looked like a frozen food company's logo -- has often required having the same glass-half-full outlook and wry sense of humor Chicago Cubs fans have had to muster so many years.

Now, even though the crowd in the Coliseum on Tuesday had the usual healthy split of jersey-wearing Rangers fans and Isles fans, Isles like being able to lord over the Rangers the fact that they've so far been the better team this season, if only by a whisker. The Islanders' ability to keeping winning without Kyle Okposo before his 22-game absence caused by a detached retina was almost as good a story as the Rangers' 11-2-3 tear without injured franchise goaltender Henrik Lundqvist. The Rangers are the team that went to the Cup finals last season. But they give the Isles their props: There is not much separating these two teams.