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Newsday photographer David Pokress was in the right place at the right time for Bobby Nystrom's Stanley Cup-winning goal

Bobby Nystrom exults after scoring goal giving Islanders the 1980 Stanley Cup. (May 24, 1980) Newsday / David L. Pokress Credit: Newsday/David L. Pokress

Photographer David Pokress spent most of the Islanders’ playoff run in 1980 covering the early weeks of the Mariel boatlift for Newsday, either in Miami or Key West, Florida, or, very often, in a newspaper-rented helicopter flying low enough to evade radar as it illegally approached Cuba.

Recalled the day before from a refugee camp in Fort Smith, Arkansas, to shoot Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final on May 24, 1980, Pokress arrived at Nassau Coliseum a half-hour before the opening faceoff, straight from John F.