Few settings in American hockey carry the same weight as Lake Placid, and on September 11, 2001, the New York Islanders found themselves there for a morning that started with training camp and turned into something no one inside the arena would ever forget.
That day marked the opening of camp for a team that had plenty of reasons to feel hopeful. General manager Mike Milbury had remade the roster, bringing in Alexei Yashin, Michael Peca and Adrian Aucoin after years of losing had worn thin on Long Island. For once, there was real buzz around the Islanders.
Then everything changed.
Peter Laviolette was beginning his first NHL head coaching job, and he remembered how quickly the day was overtaken by events far beyond hockey. Milbury came to him shortly after 9 a.m. with the first word of what was happening, but even then the full picture was still hard to grasp.
"We didn't really know," Laviolette said.
Later, Laviolette described just how early it was in the process for him as a coach when the news hit.
"I was probably two minutes into my first training camp as a head coach in the National Hockey League," Laviolette later recalled. "Day 1. I'll never forget."
Inside the arena, television monitors were carrying the news as it unfolded. Reporters trying to cover camp were suddenly working through a day that had become far bigger than hockey. Laviolette wasn’t interested in talking about the team after that, though players such as Yashin and Peca still spoke with the media while the world around them was coming apart.
The hockey eventually resumed, and that Islanders season turned into one of the franchise’s better turnaround stories. They finished with 96 points and reached the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time since 1994.
But on that morning in Lake Placid, none of that mattered.
The connection still lands hard 25 years later. Lake Placid is tied forever to the Miracle on Ice from the 1980 Winter Olympics, and the Islanders were there on September 11, 2001, at the site of one of the most celebrated moments in U.S. sports history when another, in a far different and devastating way, reshaped the country.
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