On Frozen Blog

In a league conspicuous for its parity, NHL hockey teams these days aren’t supposed to win 12 of 13 games, or 13 of 14 — and the moreso when something like the success of the entire season is compromised by a single additional loss during such a stretch. On Sunday afternoon at Verizon Center, the Capitals played their first non-must-win hockey game since the middle of March. That’s a month of Russian roulette with near nightly trigger pulls. The surprise wasn’t that the team fell flat yesterday, finally, without some hero-rescuer’s arrival. It was that it took so long to happen.

The Philadelphia Flyers, conversely, were a desperate hockey club on Sunday. And it showed.

I expressed the opinion last week that the Caps’ having a break of five days between the most important games of their season, following a month of ones virtually identical in stature, was good for the team’s fans. It was probably also good for the players. There are only so many elite emotional peaks human beings can consecutively carry off.

One of the reasons hockey is such a compelling affair to chronicle — particularly during the postseason — is the collective emotional synergy required to win. Units of 18 playing on the same page often are bested by ones of 19 or 20. Like: fourth lines coming through and playing winning roles. The Caps since the Black (and gold) Weekend of March 8-9 have been, save a single night, a unified force of 20. That’s as much a story as their winning so consecutively and qualifying for the postseason. Because it’s reason for it.

This past week of scrutiny of the Caps by national and international media almost certainly ratcheted up the emotional aura of game 1, and with players from Mike Green to Alexander Ovechkin confessing to unprecedented nerves early on Friday night, the team managed still to triumph against a two-goal, third-period-deficit odds. You had a sense, though, I think, that there was going to be, eventually, a price to pay for such prolonged prosperity. Sunday there was a bill collector named Biron at Verizon Center. The Caps’ coach afterward expressed the hope that Sunday’s reckoning would come “cheap.”

“I’ve never believed that you’re due for a game to be bad . . . Philadelphia made us look pretty bad. Hopefully it was a cheap lesson,” Boudreau said.

Prior to Sunday, the Caps last lost a hockey game on March 19 in Chicago (also a shutout). They’d hung on for a harrowing triumph in Nashville the night before. The encountered a rested Blackhawks’ club and 21,000 of their supporters in a trap game. The 5-0 result was an aberrational outing in the spring of 2008. Caps’ fans have to hope Sunday’s was as well. The body of this team’s work the past two months is highly suggestive that it was.

If there are ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys to a hockey club’s competitive psyche, the real story of Sunday was the at-last arrival of an emotional flat-lining, of the breaks uniformly going the other way, so late in spring for a team in a sport whose bounces toward bad fortune can’t be forecast from one dump in to the next.

With one point separating these two teams after 82 regular season season games, with two quality netminders backstopping clubs that finished the regular season as strong as anyone in the league, with firepower and youthful exuberance spread out all over the ice, the Sunday stunner would have been one club seizing a commanding 2-0 lead in games. This one isn’t ending early — or easily. We have a good old fashioned, hard-to-call hockey series on our hands.

Capitals’ players and coaches spent all last week claiming that they’d been playoff battle-tested by the previous month — playing weeks’ worth of “Game 7s” night in, night out. The new challenge confronting them this morning is dusting off a big-game’s defeat and rising back up to an elite, united peak.