Is there a light up ahead?
I can’t hold on very long
Forgive me, pretty baby, but I always take the long way home
>>”Long Way Home,” Tom Waits
The New York Islanders have completed the first, fairly grueling six-game portion of their 13-game road sentence to open the 2021-22 season as they wait for their new arena to open. The next seven games of the schedule are not exactly easy — there are two back-to-backs, and they revisit both Florida teams for the second of those — but it won’t have quite the zig-zag, cross-country, Central-to-East-to-Pacific time travel that this first six-game portion did.