Auf gefrorenem Blog

Daß und Alex Kovalevs Hochstock hallo in den Sekunden öffnung der Donnerstag Nacht. Alex got mad, Alex’s team needed a victory, and so Alex decided the outcome — but in a manner that is now known as the Ovechkin hat trick: something broken (perhaps a nose), certainly some stitches, and goals in every period, including a game-winner in OT. Also, hit everything that moves. Hard. No surprise at this site: a talented hockey blogger — our good friend Peerless — coined it. A performance that saw Ovie pass Sidney in aura and Howe in bravado.

Not a bad night’s work.

Following came the Ray Ferraro video. The Washington Post getting engaged in the buzz. The fawning and head-shakings of his All Star peers published and broadcast. Canadian partisans a month ago singing Sidney’s anthem now are serenading Ovechkin’s supremacy — and doing so, befitting their heritage, with gratitude, for Alex’s ascension means that hockey has gotten better.

When in April 2004 the Entry Draft lottery results were made known at noontime that very sunny day I made a friend leave work and drive far and furiously to purchase Russian beer. That same friend rang my cell phone as I exited Verizon Center Thursday night.

“You were right then,” he told me. “He will will us to a Cup.”

On Friday morning my father rang my cell from a hotel in south Florida, where he was set to begin a sailboat vacation in the Caribbean. Traveling on Thursday night, he hadn’t been able to see the game. Early Friday morning, with his hotel cafe coffee, he glanced up at a flatscreen’s sports highlight segment of Thursday night.

“It was three minutes long,” he told me. “It led with Ovechkin. All of his goals. They showed all of them. Then they replayed all of them, in slow motion, as if the sportscaster anticipated that his viewers wouldn’t believe the results replayed in actual speed.”

This breaking news over-coverage was taking place in south Florida.

“We in Washington have our Gretzky,” my father concluded.