Courtesy of @LROBONEWS

Andy Greene has played 873 games in a New Jersey Devils sweater, but that hasn’t bought him any special treatment at the Prudential Center.

After the Devils’ season-opening loss to Winnipeg, Greene dipped out of the locker room to visit the family room. He cut through the practice rink on his way back — the quickest route.

When he tried to rejoin his team at the media entrance, a security guard stopped the Devils captain and asked…for his credential. Wearing his post-game attire — a black devils hoodie, hat and shorts — Greene did the only thing he could, answer truthfully.

“I’m like, ‘Uhh…no. I’m № 6. Andy Greene,’” Greene said.

The response got the security guard thinking, but he wasn’t totally sold. So, the guard asked if any of the reporters could vouch for him and luckily for Greene, WBGO’s Doug Doyle happened to be walking out of the locker room.

“That’s Andy Greene!” Doyle said. “I couldn’t believe it. That was hilarious.”

The guard turned to Doyle and asked him to confirm Greene was indeed a part of the team. Doyle tempered his surprise and played it cool, as if not to point out Greene, Devils captain since 2015, had been denied entry to his own locker room.

“Yeah,” Doyle said. “He’s a big part of the team.”

In the scramble to leave New Jersey and fly to Buffalo for the second half of a back-to-back, Greene didn’t get the chance to share this incident with his teammates. But when Devils center Travis Zajac heard the story, he couldn’t hide his amusement.

“Hey, we got great security here,” Zajac said. “I guess Greener just has one of those faces you just forget about.”

And in the security guard’s defense, Zajac has a point. Greene is a pretty normal looking guy. At 5 feet 11 inches and 190 pounds, he’s not built like the 215-pound John Hayden or anywhere near as tall as the 6-feet-4-inch Mackenzie Blackwood.

Greene couldn’t remember a time he’s been locked out at his home rink, but the incident did remind him of how different things used to be.

“When I first came [into the league] if you just showed up in a suit and just acted like you knew what you were doing, you could probably get into any rink you could ever want to,” Greene said. “But now its [secure]. They’ll make sure we have our NHLPA cards and we show them everywhere.”

Although the misunderstanding made for an awkward situation, Greene wound up with a funny story and new respect for the Prudential Center’s security staff.

“He was just doing his job,” Greene said. “And that was good.”

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For more New Jersey Devils coverage, you can follow Justin Birnbaum on Twitter here.

This story was excerpted from the October 16, 2019 edition of The Fischler Report. To inquire about subscriptions, please email FischlerReport@gmail.com.