It was an ill-conceived, half-baked, stopgap of an idea. Characters came and went, to varying degrees of integrity and motivation. The future of a once-proud pro sports team hung in the balance, and New York barely held on.

Now that the Islanders’ tenure at Barclays Center very likely has come to a close, so ends a complicated and tumultuous chapter in the franchise’s history. Really, it ends a strange time in New York sports history, as this suburban outfit was never meant for the city. Everything about the Islanders in Brooklyn for almost five years felt forced, and everyone knew it. Well, almost everyone.

But now that the NHL is in a “pause” due to the coronavirus pandemic, there is little chance the Isles (or any other NHL team) will skate in that ill-fated building again. When the schedule was stopped on March 12, the Islanders had only two more games on the schedule in Brooklyn, the final one March 22 against the Hurricanes. They were then set to play out the rest of this regular season, all this possible postseason, and all of the 2020-21 campaign, at the Coliseum.

The franchise’s ancestral home since its inaugural season of 1972-73, the Coliseum has had a recent facelift, but is still the same antiquated monolith in the middle of Long Island that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has kindly dubbed “not a major league facility.” Starting in 2021-22, the club is planning to move into its new digs at Belmont Park. Even though the global health crisis has halted construction, most involved believe the timeline for opening remains intact. Even when stability is within their grasp, the Islanders never can walk a smooth path.

Yet for all the anger and frustration that came with the club’s tenure in Brooklyn, surely the fans would prefer to look back on this time with disdain rather than look afar at the Seattle Islanders, the Kansas City Islanders, or, say, the Quebec Insulaires.

Oui?

On Dec. 12, 2010, more than 1,000 fans from Quebec City rode buses to the Coliseum and chanted in French. They had lost the Nordiques to Denver in 1995, and saw the Islanders as a desperate franchise ripe for the picking.

Owner Charles Wang never could get his privately funded “Lighthouse” project off the ground, hung by red tape with Town of Hempstead executive Kate Murray standing on the gallows. County Executive Ed Mangano — beginning his own term that could put him in jail soon for corruption — then eventually held a referendum vote by the residents on a $400 million, publicly funded project that included a new Islanders arena. On Aug. 2, 2011, it was shot down.

“Sound bites ruled the day,” Wang said, “not facts.”

Wang was friendly with Nets owner Bruce Ratner, who was planning to move his NBA team from New Jersey to Brooklyn, where he had hired famous architect Frank Gehry to build a sprawling new arena in one of the hottest real estate areas in the country. The plan included the ability to accommodate hockey, but then the financial crisis of 2008 hit. Ratner had to sell the majority of the Nets and a big stake in the building to Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, and the project saved $100 million in costs by eliminating hockey.

Yet Wang lived on Long Island and knew the history of the franchise and how much the Islanders meant to the area. The players from those dynasty teams that won four straight Stanley Cups and 19 straight playoff series from 1980-84 became part of the fabric of communities, and many still are. The fan base had suffered through the mostly fallow times of two decades, including almost getting sold to a broke con man named John Spano in 1996, and Wang wanted a return to prominence, even if he had no idea how to do it. He hemorrhaged millions and millions of dollars, and heard the calls from other cities, in the U.S. and in Canada. But he believed it was paramount to keep the Islanders in New York.

Just a month after Barclays Center opened in 2012, the Islanders announced they had signed a 25-year lease to play there, starting in 2015-16, once their lease at the Coliseum ended. They were excited to have a new building, no matter how imperfect.

“I think there’s one word for it — beautiful,” Wang said.

There were many other words in the coming years, as well.

From the first regular-season game at Barclays Center, a 3-2 overtime loss to the Blackhawks on Oct. 9, 2015, to the most recent home game there, a 6-2 loss to the Canadiens on March 3 when Johnny Boychuk had his face sliced open by a skate, the Islanders were at least partially an urbanite outfit. And they had success there, too, winning their first playoff series in 23 years with a double-overtime goal by John Tavares in Game 6 against the Panthers in the 2016 first round, amassing an overall record of 85-48-21 over parts of five seasons.

Yet the aesthetics of the arena were black and gray, faux-wood and stylized signage. There was a smell pumped into the place that was better than stale beer, but certainly didn’t make it feel like a hockey rink. There was not nearly enough parking nearby, while the Jackie Robinson Parkway and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway coming from Long Island were unforgiving thoroughfares in the best of times. The improved train service from the Long Island Railroad to Atlantic Terminal hardly sufficed.

The accommodations for the players were terrific, but they still practiced on Long Island, where everyone lived. Car service to and from the arena was a nice touch, but it cut into players’ game-day routines. As one agent said, “It was just a pain in the ass.” Of course, players around the league talk.

More importantly, there were about 400 seats with horribly obstructed views — which became the focus, especially after an article ran in the New York Times following a preseason game in 2014, before the actual move. The scoreboard was off-center, and it had the second-smallest capacity in the league, no matter how many times they rejiggered the seats.

Worse, the ice was atrocious. Soon it became common knowledge that the pipes used to make the ice were plastic, unsuitable to maintain an NHL-worthy surface. Replacing them with metal would be too costly, both in terms of construction and shutting down the arena for months. Star center John Tavares had his heel dig into the soft ice on March 31, 2017, and he suffered a hamstring injury that ended his season. “That doesn’t happen in other places,” alternate captain Cal Clutterbuck said. When Tavares became a free agent in the summer of 2018, he left to sign with his hometown Maple Leafs.

In 2013, Ratner had won the bid to renovate the Coliseum, and so rumors began to swirl about bringing the Islanders back. Turns out there was a clause in the lease that allowed the team to leave Barclays after four seasons. The same political machine of Nassau County that essentially had kicked the Islanders out was now calling for them to return.

The business sides also aligned, as the franchise had given up its sales and marketing to Barclays Center in exchange for a yearly fee around $50 million. Wang had been losing so much money that it turned out to be a great deal for him. Barclays Center CEO Brett Yormark couldn’t find a way to market the Islanders — difficult with his head on a swivel serving so many masters — and soon a divorce appeared imminent.

But Wang was tired of all the posturing and losses. In the summer of 2014, he agreed to sell the team to Scott Malkin and Jon Ledecky in a transition that would take two years. The two businessmen took over in 2016, and by 2018-19, the Islanders started splitting home games between Barclays Center and the renovated Coliseum — which somehow buried $170 million of work in the same aesthetics of Brooklyn with hardly any practical upgrades.

The goal was always to get a permanent new arena, and that came when the Islanders won a bid to develop a piece of land near the race track at Belmont. It is a privately funded $1.3 billion plan, with retail and a hotel and a new LIRR station. It’s a lot like Wang’s Lighthouse, with far more political and business savvy that actually got it done.

And the hope, above all, is that it ends the saga of the traveling Islanders.

“I think, honestly, with that place, it always felt temporary,” Clutterbuck said.

Maybe next season will be the proper send-off for the Islanders in the Coliseum, and that part of history can finally be put to bed. Maybe in a few decades, the Brooklyn tryst won’t be looked at with such frustration, because just maybe it will be clear it was necessary to keep the franchise from moving.

And to that, Islanders fans would happily say, oui!