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The Caps, according to Perreault, have taken notice of his play, meeting with him on numerous occasions already this season.

“They came to see me four times so far and in each occasion we’ve gone at the restaurant and they give me some feedback and also talked about some details to improve but so far they like the way I’m playing,” he said.

The Perreault draft selection is novel, too, for the sheer fact of his playing in the Q. The Caps historically have been, to put it mildly, tepid supporters of that development league. If like me you regard 1998 as General Manager George McPhee’s first full-fledged entry draft with Washington — he was hired on June 9, 1997, and conducted that summer’s draft without his selected scouting staff and with what was likely largely Washington’s existing draft list — the Caps, from 1998 through 2005, selected a grand total of three QMJHL players . . . with 75 picks. In his eight draft classes prior to 2006, McPhee and his scouts selected Q leaguers in just two of them. Q first-rounders selected by the Caps in the McPhee years, including 1997?

Zero.

2005 first-rounder Sasha Pokulok hails from Montreal, but he chose to play junior hockey in Saskatchewan and then two seasons at Cornell before turning pro. This backdrop makes the francophoning of McPhee’s 2006 draft class remarkable. In addition to Perreault, he chose Francois Bouchard (a right wing currently 5th in the Q in scoring) of Baie Comeau in the second round and Maxime Lacroix of Quebec in the fifth round. In other words, at one draft table this past June McPhee equaled the cumulative tally of Q leaguers he had previously selected in the entirety of his drafting for the team.

This wasn’t a break in draft pattern merely for the sake of shaking things up linguistically. The Q, once the CHL’s primary repository for skilled prospects but more recently the home of gifted butterfly netminders and little else, simply produced a deeper pool of high-end skating talent in 2005 and 2006. So much of the McPhee/Mahoney draft pool until this past summer was flavored western Canadian, but if guys like Perreault and Bouchard pan out, in a few years we could see a real UN roster in Washington — Russians and western Canadians and eastern Canadians joining French Canadians and Americans. Maybe still the German in goal.

More immediate is the ever-increasingly intriguing question of where guys like Perreault and Bouchard stand in terms of HockeyCanada’s World Juniors selection committee. The World Juniors are less than a month away in Sweden, and on one hand, you’d think two guys ranked in the top 5 of scorers in the Q would be automatically regarded as legitimate candidates for the Canadian roster. But as non first-rounders — and in Perreault’s case, a 6th rounder — attempting to dislodge scores of high-profile prospects, not to mention that the Canadians return many skilled fowards from last year’s gold medal winning club, the Caps’ ‘06 Q leaguers could be victims of a basic numbers game.

French-speaking Canada has produced some of hockey’s most prolific and entertaining scorers since the inception of the NHL, but it’s interesting to note that the Caps haven’t really had a high-profile Quebecois ever wear their sweater. Guy Charron scored 118 goals in five years with the Caps in the mid-to-late ’70s, and Alan Haworth tallied 129 in five seasons the following decade. Neither were drafted by the Caps. There isn’t a French Canadian in the top 10 in scoring goals, assists, or even games played as a Cap.

Will Perreault — or Bouchard — finally be francophones to make a lasting impact in Washington? Perreault’s size and draft selection slotting strongly suggest that the odds of his making it in D.C. are longshot to be sure. But the ride he’s taking Caps’ fans on now ought to be enjoyed for its own sake.

We haven’t seen its like, as an asset of ours, in that region before.