Ruh-Roh...

There are things that may go un-noticed until you remove other things.  This turned out to be a big thing in this case.
We decided to pull the "paper" off just to see what was underneath and this is what we found-

It looks like we may be able to peel back to 2 layers in order to do the repair.

We have decided to put a formica sheet up instead of the same wood product.