NEW YORK -- On Ralph Macchio's Twitter timeline is a shot of the parking lot at Nassau Coliseum, the venerable building in the background with a close-up of a box of New York Islanders tissues.
A lifelong, die-hard fan, the actor most famous for his starring role in "The Karate Kid" was unable to attend the Islanders' regular-season finale at the Coliseum against the Columbus Blue Jackets, so he shared the photo to express his fandom, along with a hashtag drawn from a famous poem: #NothingGoldCanStay
Robert Frost's poem is featured in the 1967 novel "The Outsiders" and the 1983 film adaptation that starred Macchio and C. Thomas Howell. It was Howell's Ponyboy Curtis character who recited the poem aloud to his friend Johnny Cade (Macchio) while hiding out in an abandoned church.
Macchio saw an opportunity to link the hockey and cinematic worlds together to create his own poignant farewell to the 43-year-old Coliseum.
"'Nothing Gold Can Stay' is about youth," Macchio said. "It's about how times do change and situations do change. You just embrace those great moments. The 43 years at Nassau Coliseum will no longer be. There's the 'Nothing Gold Can Stay,' but you carry that legacy on. I thought that was a quasi-smart way of tying the movie I was in together with the team that I had rooted for."