The Islanders wanted to start strong.
They wanted to take a lead and play with a lead.
They wanted to stop digging themselves a hole in the first period, something they’d done in seven of their first eight games following the Olympic break.
Check, check and check on Saturday night, when a 3-0 first period powered an eventual 3-2 win over the Flames at UBS Arena.
We’ll see if they can keep it up on Tuesday night in Toronto, but here was proof positive that the Islanders can do plenty in the first period.
The playing with a lead bit, admittedly, may need some work, as the Islanders let Calgary back into the game in a third that got way too close for comfort.
Dustin Wolf, who relieved Devin Cooley after the latter coughed up a three-goal first, was simply excellent for Calgary, giving the Flames a chance to come back, and the warning signs started to blare 2:17 into the third, when Mikael Backlund tipped in Olli Maatta’s shot to make it 3-1.
Wolf pulled out a show-stopper on Cal Ritchie shortly thereafter — his second terrific save off a rebound after robbing Matthew Schaefer late in the second — to keep it that way.
Then at the 8:28 mark, Blake Coleman took advantage of a poorly-timed change to cut the lead to 3-2.
The Flames didn’t let up from there.
The Islanders may have successfully defended their lead in the end, but it would be hard to claim they played a good 60 minutes.
It was more like a good 70 minutes, starting halfway through Friday’s game and bridging through Saturday’s second period.
Enough to split the two games at home, not quite enough to be thrilled about anything — though, they certainly accomplished the goal of starting off well.
Arguably as important as the start, with Saturday also came proof that Simon Holmstrom does not need Jean-Gabriel Pageau centering him to impact the game at a high level.
Patrick Roy finally broke up the duo that had played all but two games together since Jan. 6, usually on the third line with Anders Lee, to put Holmstrom on the right side of Brayden Schenn Saturday, with Anthony Duclair back in to complete the second line.
That allowed Cal Ritchie to go to the third line with Lee and Pageau, while Ondrej Palat played on the fourth line, where he finished Friday’s loss to the Kings, with Casey Cizikas and Kyle MacLean.
The almost innate chemistry Holmstrom has with Pageau has always been the implicit argument against this sort of move.
Schenn, though, is not too dissimilar of a player to Pageau, and found himself in the sort of spot Pageau often is at 16:35 of the first: feeding Holmstrom on the rush for a goal that made it 2-0 Islanders.
Holmstrom got on the board again just a few minutes later, this one shorthanded and — as per usual — from Pageau after the latter had started the rush when Yegor Sharangovich fumbled a puck.
The pair of late goals belied a first period in which the Islanders had played excellent hockey, and in which the aforementioned lineup changes paid dividends.
Cizikas jammed one in at the front of the net to open the scoring 10:06 in, and all four lines — including the Emil Heineman, Bo Horvat, Mat Barzal trio that had accounted for both goals on Friday night and was unchanged from the second half of that game — had it going.
At 81 points, the Islanders are one short of their total from last year, and at 38 wins, they’ve already surpassed the 35 from 2024-25, not that there are any medals for being better than that mediocre outfit.
By winning, the Islanders ensured they would end the night no worse than third in the Metro, but there was scoreboard-watching from the afternoon, when the Bruins beat Washington in a shootout, until deep into the night, when the Penguins were facing Utah in Salt Lake City.
That, of course, is much less stressful when the Islanders take care of business adequately.
It was thanks to their start that they did just that.
