On Frozen Blog

Four remarkable factors stand out to me as distinctive in April 2009 relative to what the Capitals and their fans experienced one postseason April ago. The first is that whereas last April HockeyWashington more or less breathed a grey-haired sigh of relief in seeing the Caps just qualify for the postseason — a reality that didn’t become settled until the final horn of the final regular season game last April — this spring’s concluding regular season weeks were a distraction, a quasi annoyance, for the team and its fans. We knew we would qualify in January. We wanted the postseason to begin around Valentine’s Day. There is, too, this spring the widespread expectation of the Caps doing very real damage in the Eastern conference postseason. That is a very healthy maturation for both the organization and its fanbase.   

Last March and early April were such a whirlwind of drama, every night really a must-win scenario for the Caps, that really game 1 against the Flyers carried an almost anti-climactic aura to it. We fans were a bit drama hungover from the all-sensory assault brought about by the unbelievably unlikely ashes-to-champagne run to the Southeast division title. But this April we have a 108-pt. hockey club calling Washington home; few such postseason participants aren’t legtimate Stanley Cup contenders, ever.

Alexander Ovechkin this season has staked his Hart Trophy candidacy to no small degree on his newfound status as Mr. Clutch — he fairly owned the third periods of tight hockey games this season. This is his postseason to strut Conn Smythe stuff. If he does, there is the strong likelihood of the Caps playing hockey well into the warm weather months here.  

I cannot avoid sensing this spring being a remarkably opportune time for an already thriving hockey franchise — there will be no such thing as a hockey game in Washington next season that isn’t sold out, if you can fathom – to forge a lasting re-orienting of the local sports hierarchy here. Were the Wizards afforded another two weeks of regular season play, they’d tally 70 losses on the season. The Nationals may achieve 70 losses by Independence Day. The Washington Capitals are genuinely the only source of winning pride in these parts. Only the Caps offer local sports fans passion-igniting MoJo.  

This spring is an incredibly rare opportunity for the Capitals to make some major postseason noise and in so doing thrust their team and their sport to a privileged perch in the local sports scene — one they’ve never enjoyed in durable fashion. I’m thinking in precisely the way Mario’s Pens shouldered their way up virtually alongside the demi-god Steelers (and well past the Pirates) two decades ago during their Stanley Cup pursuits. The Washington Post has played the role of lead impediment in this pursuit, but if you don’t think the paper has bandwagoned into form, take a look at its hockey playoff portal for the Caps now in place.  

The Capitals, however, enjoy a novel advantage in their present status as globally appealing in a way Mario’s Pens never did. The Caps are very much a team popular across continents — evoking pledges of allegiance most particularly among Canadian hockey fans whose teams aren’t in the postseason. We first learned of this phenomenon last spring, and it’s back this. The Hockey News didn’t publish a Caps’ cover story titled ‘The Most Exciting Team in the NHL’ for nothing. Local media, at long belatedly last, is realizing what the rest of Planet Hockey has.

Now consider this: beginning tonight, Verizon Center will inaugurate a justifiable claim to being truly one of the most distinctive and intimidating atmospheres for visiting teams in all of sports. The Sea of Red, Very Loud Love that enveloped the Caps in last April’s playoffs — which conspicuously excluded two decades’ duration of Orange and Black noisemakers seated among them– caught everyone off guard. And the 2008-09 regular season proved that the Red Rising was no temporary spasm of feel-good front-running. We are a hockey town. And inside our rink we surely look and sound like one.

Lastly, this April brings an important identity to the contending Capitals. Washington’s very strong 1980s playoff clubs really lacked intimidating personalities (stud goalies, scorching snipers), the type that strike fear into opponents’ hearts in, say, playoff overtime. Let us sit back and survey the crunch-time work of the world’s greatest hockey player, one who just happens the skate alongside a cast of no small number of Young Gun studs. This April, unlike last, they aren’t wide-eyed playoff rookies. They are hungry, and they want to playoff party a while.