HIGHLY recommend this story by Neil Best of Newsday. To get around the paywall, here is the link to Best’s Twitter. Scroll down and find the tweet with the story.

It is an enjoyable read about one of the all-time greats in any press box:

Stan Fischler enjoys the subway ride to Madison Square Garden from his apartment in upper Manhattan. He enjoys the ride to Barclays Center twice as much.

That is because it takes twice as long.

“The more you’re on it, the more fun it is,” he said. “I’m getting double my money’s worth. I’d ride it all day if I could.”

Fischler, 83, who also answers to “The Hockey Maven,” was speaking on the No. 3 train en route to Brooklyn on Tuesday for a Devils-Islanders game on which he would appear for MSG on both teams’ telecasts.

That includes working the Islanders’ locker room doing postgame interviews, a job customarily filled on local networks by neatly coiffed young women and men.

Fischler was born during the Hoover Administration, and he arrived at Barclays wearing green pants.

This young, transitional Islanders season has been one of mixed emotions for him. “Mixed, mixed, mixed,” he said.

On one hand, he has covered them on TV for 40 years, counts their first Stanley Cup in 1980 as his greatest hockey memory and is a traditionalist who will miss the people and history at Nassau Coliseum.

On the other, Fischler happens to be an expert not only on the history of hockey — the subject of most of his more than 100 books — but also on subways, about which he has written a half-dozen books.

So it has been a serendipitous blessing suddenlyto have the team he covers move to his native borough, within subway distance, at this late stage of his career.