It's supposed to be about a million degrees today in D.C., so necessarily I'm insulating myself with frigid thoughts. Specifically, I have Sunday, September 16 on my mind. It'll still be mild-to-warm then, especially in Raleigh, North Carolina, but Hurricanes' management is doing something wonderfully frosty for the Research Triangle community that day: it's authorizing the free admission of every single fan into HBC Arena for the exhibition matinee between the Canes and the Washington Capitals. Approximately 29 other NHL franchises should follow suit this and every September.

In the days immediately following the resolution of the NHL's lockout a couple of years back, and before OFB, I wrote an opinion for a Caps' 'Net newsgroup premised on the idea that that fall the entirety of the league's exhibition slate should have been wide open and free of charge to the American sports consumer. It wasn't just an act of good faith/good will I was advocating as olive branch; having been in scores of rinks large and small over the years in September, I was acutely aware of how modest the NHL's draw was during football's kickoff month. Let's put it this way: the Caps aren't the only NHL team slightly inflating the announced attendance (of 8,500) for those hear-the-crickets-chirping affairs.

In a fitting show of their we're-in-tune-with-the-state-of-hockey in the States that autumn, a grand total of zero NHL clubs thought like I did.

Let's face facts: September is football month. Approximately 200 million Americans today hyperventilate over pigskins' arrival on Saturdays and Sundays then. (I'm a Saturday-in-South Bend guy.) And their appetite is virtually just as acute in October. Now if the NHL were an uber hot commodity come November, through the cold weather months, we might well dismiss September's seriously sorry gate returns. And to be fair, the NHL is no gut-'em-like-dead-deer-on-admission-rates league in general . . . like say a certain NFL owner in town, who insists that his season ticket holders purchase, at a cost of hundreds of dollars, the entirety of the league's preseason tilt (parking (also hundreds of dollars) not included). And in the Panthers and the pigskin versions of Tar Heels and Blue Devils, the Carolina 'Canes don't face quite the sports dollar challenge that Mr. Leonsis does here.

All the more reason, isn't it, for the Caps to think outside the box a bit with respect to the handful of Verizon Center dates the club hosts every September? There's precedent for this kind of marketing/altruism in town: our Shakespeare Theater takes one of its world-class productions to Carter Baron Amphitheater every June for a week to introduce classical theater, free of charge, to Washingtonians who aren't regular theater patrons. This is not to suggest that orating Henry's Agincourt challenge to his beleaguered British troops is a serious rival to thwarting the Rangers' power play. (Still, we might christen the first Caps' free-for-all at Verizon "Susan O'Malley Savings Night," as challenge to that marketing guru's religious belief that there weren't hockey fans enough in 5-million-resident greater D.C. to fill a hockey rink during the Stanley Cup Finals.)