On Frozen Blog

Through the middle of the first week of March, we’re gaining, at long last, a firm sense of identities in the Southeast division. To state the most obvious, Tampa and Atlanta have forks in them: It’s a three-team race through the final 15 games, and Florida could be the next casualty. Their no. 2 goalie is their best and hottest goalie.

Speaking of hot no. 2 goalies, we learned Wednesday night in upstate New York that there’s a lot of fight left in Olaf Kolzig. ‘Clutch’ is the only way to describe no. 37’s stellar effort against a Buffalo club that had prevailed in almost all of the previous 15 games against the Caps. Since the 2003-04 season, Buffalo had vexed the Caps more than any team in the East; in 15 games, including three this year, the Caps had earned only four points out of a possible 30 against the Sabres. Dispassionate or partisan, you can’t look at Wednesday night’s outcome — hard on the heels of Monday’s Massacre — and not think something special might be brewing.

In this the springtime of our increasing content, none of the bad karma of the past much seems to matter. This is a hockey team that’s absorbed two-and-a-half seasons’ worth of rough blows, appears today to have profitted from them, is guided by an upstart and Adams-candidate coach, a Hart-and-a-few-other-pieces-of-hardware leading left wing, and perhaps most of all is skating in a hockey sunrise’s aura.

Take a look at the way this weekend sets up: Huet — white-hot in his career against the Bs (who responded to Monday’s massacre by failing to score a single goal at home against Florida the very next night) — a likely starter Saturday, and Kolzig, seeking victory no. 300 of his career, at a sold-out Verizon Center Sunday afternoon, against the black and gold and poorly coiffed. Think Coach Boudreau might reference what’s at stake for Olie in his pre-game comments Sunday? Think the home partisans might be behind no. 37 to prevail in that one? Think Kolzig himself could ever want to win a game as much as that one, on national TV?

I know the Hollywood writer’s strike is over, but is elite script-writing suddenly stationed in a D.C. hockey rink? Some weeks back, the Caps were rather commonly identified as the season’s “feel-good” story. It’s suddenly starting to feel a lot better, and more significant, now.

Wednesday morning here had the feeling of anticipation of a playoff game in the evening, and the game in Buffalo was contested very much like a postseason showdown: the scoring was low, the checking tight, the goaltending superb. There was even a grotesque and incongruous imbalance of power plays tilted against the Caps. And for good measure, a lengthy ‘was-it-a-goal?’ replay that outlasted the Caps’ flight to Buffalo. Somehow, just like in springtime 10 years ago, the visitors prevailed. This team has won four of its last five, against formidable foes, and imagine if they can add their captain to the mix in the next few weeks.

But here’s what’s beginning to distinguish the 2008 Caps from their counterparts of 10 years ago: the every-shift presence of a go-to guy who can come through in the clutch en route to a Hart Trophy (among others). Seriously, it’s necessarily the case that if the Caps qualify for the potseason the league’s finest performer will be wearing a Caps’ sweater. How marvelous would it be to have Kolzig partially backstop another memorable run in hockey’s spring, but with the franchise’s greatest-ever talent also helping out? Not Todd Krygier as hero, but rather the planet’s best hockey player. That ‘98 Caps’ team finished the regular season 10 games above .500 — kinda about what this team just might.

We began hearing the first whispers of “That Caps club could be dangerous in the postseason” a few weeks ago — before the arrivals of Huet, Fedorov, and Cooke.

All of us in D.C. are understandably focused on the night-in, night-out scores of March 2008, but it’s worth noting that a durable changing of the guard in the Southeast is likely taking place as well this spring. Atlanta won the Southeast last year, was unceremoniously swept in round one by the Rags, and has made little news since save for the sell-off of Marian Hossa. Tampa was able to resign Dan Boyle last week, and at long last acquire a good netminder (Mike Smith), but it parted with another key piece of the 2004 Cup champions, Brad Richards, and will again miss the postseason. The battered Hurricanes’ are playing fabulously this stretch run, but there’s an awful lot of age in that organization. Among the rest of the Southeast there is precious little in the way of prized prospects to bolster the present mediocrity.

The Caps’ owner on Tuesday told television viewers of Washington Post Live that his team absolutely had to win two of its next three games. Wednesday night, it won the toughest of those — the first, on the road, against a club it rarely had beaten the past three seasons.

Times are a ‘changin. But is some respects, they’re also looking like better than our favorite spring.