On Frozen Blog

In following the Capitals this month, HockeyWashington needs a new nomenclature associated with the high highs, the very low lows, and the general emotional and psychological battle scars the Capitals’ successes and failures in crunch time 2008 nightly occasion. There is at present nothing in HockeyWashington’s lexicon to describe the current psychological state of the fanbase. Which is: rebuilt like the club itself, riddled with woe, irrationally exuberant, and rife with uncertainty and myriad superstitions as it relates to the team’s postseason pursuit.
And that’s only from March’s opening week.
I’m also noticing this: our hair — before it falls out — thoroughly silvers.
In the span of 10 days the fanbase endured one of the most disheartening non-playoff weekends in franchise history (Black (and gold) Saturday and Sunday), the gradual return to optimism via incremental victory the week following, a heart-stoppingly tense, must-win Sunday matin?ɬ©e that culminated with the bane of the Capitals’ post-lockout existence — the ugly, gelatinous, and bad-breath blind date that is the shootout — and finally arrival at cautious optimism at the onset of the most important roadtrip the Capitals’ have embarked on this decade.
Then, there was Day 11, and periods two and three in Nashville last night. At 8:45 Tuesday evening I had Dick Clark’s hair; by 10:00, Joan Rivers’; at 10:40, Jonathon Warner’s.
Other than that, there’s been nothing much to get excited about this month.
Worse, the real agony of anxiety lies ahead.
The term “roller coaster” as it applies to the fortunes of sports teams is cliched, superficial, and hopelessly incomplete — and especially in denoting the vagaries of the Capitals’ fanbase’s collective emotional state this March. There is nothing amusement park, or hilly and mildly bumpy, about what HockeyWashington is experiencing now. More like: dungeons and Morning stars and Catherine wheels maurauding Caps’ fan psyches.
Have Capitals’ fans ever more needed a gameless St. Patrick’s day in club history?
Consider that at the end of Bloody-Saturday-Bloody-Sunday, conventional wisdom was that this young, inexperienced Capitals’ club needed to close out the season on a 10-2 clip to have plausible postseason aspirations. This from the club that had failed to win more than four games consecutively all season. So if with irrational passion you clung optimistically to such a forecast, necessarily you also expect a spirit of productive bipartisanship to envelop Capitol Hill in advance of November’s elections.
But perhaps taking a cue from the head coach, who told the media on March 9 that his team would approach the season’s final dozen games “one game at a time,” the fans may have adopted a similar sanity-preserving myopia. But fans aren’t head coaches or general managers or 16-year veterans like Sergei Fedorov. So for instance, early Tuesday night in Nashville Caps’ fans learned that one Bill McCreary would officiate their first game of the road trip.
Particularly after Sunday’s trial, who among them wouldn’t subsequently Google “Kevorkian, painless relief”?
The ideal recipe for tranquility on Tuesday night would have been to enjoy period one, take two Tylenol PMs to avoid periods two and three, and awake Wednesday morning to Comcast Sportsrise scroll of “Capitals 4, Nashville 2,” imagining an undramatic resolution in Music City. Most of us, though, toughed it out, and lurched closer toward expensive therapy.
Suddenly, a 10-2 needed run has been reduced to 6-2. Or, perhaps . . . 5-2-1? Does the latter seem so far-fetched?
I know that my father is deeply in love with his second wife, as he allows her to schedule vacations at this time of year and accompanies her on them. Necessarily, she’s abandoned in airport terminals in their travels as Dad shoulder-checks aside traveling businessmen in pursuit of access to lounge televisions and hockey score updates. They were traveling this past Sunday, and whatever airport they were in wasn’t hockey cooperating, so early that evening he rang my cell. It was marvelous for me to hear youthful anxiety in his desperate and unknowing voice, and report, teasingly, “Shootout . . . [tortuous pause] and victory.”
Dad is golfing and lodging with his in-laws in Florida this week. They’re in their eighties and without cable television. (I’ve never been so happy to be so bachelored.) He rang me again Tuesday night at 9:30, thinking I’d have a final score from Nashville for him while failing to realize that the Caps were competing in the Central time zone. “The good news is that it’s 3-1 good guys in the third,” I told him, “the bad news is that McCreary is working the game.” He then laid out the communications protocols for relaying resolution to him in the home of eighty-somethings. No call back meant all went forward well; a ring meant a McCreay-made mess.
When he’s done vacationing, we have fanciful visions of a dream April in which I take time off work, Jeep down to his shore home, and over five days help him build a shed by day and watch Capitals’ playoff hockey with beers by night. Now that would be a welcomed spring break.
There has never been a March like this for Capitals’ fans in the team’s history. Important March months, important stretch runs yes, but nothing as all-consuming and home- and work- and message board-affecting as this one. In the interest of not making the region’s psychotherapists wealthier than its lawyers, let’s hope there’s not another like it. Ever.
So what do we call this March Madness we’re in? (A well overworn cliche in its own right.) “Disorder” seems one authentic component to the diagnosis. How about Hairless Hope, (Eh?), Springs Eternal Disorder?