On Frozen Blog

To put it mildly, I’m pumped about the visit I’m making to Hershey this weekend — for championship hockey.

When the Caps were eliminated by Pittsburgh in a rout of a game 7 here last month, I didn’t think I’d have much of an emotional engagement with hockey again this season. But wisely, I made Hershey a bit of a healing visit just three days after the Capitals’ exit, and then, in a feat of additional wisdom, I started listening on line to John Walton’s calls of the Bears’ deep playoff push.

Renewal and re-addiction were inevitable.

Last Sunday we posted a link to a download of JW’s call of the Bears’ overtime triumph in game 1 of the Calder Cup finals. If you haven’t listened to it yet, do so now before proceeding with the rest of this file. If you have, go back and listen again. Eventually this hockey season will end, but I’m going to do my darndest to golf 18 holes with Walton after it does in the hopes that I can have him call one of my successful birdie putts. I’d listen to him call out bingo numbers in Dubuque on a July Saturday night.  

Tomorrow will mark precisely six months to the day since I met Pepper in Toronto for the Caps and Leafs in Air Canada Centre on a Saturday night, and so it’s a thrill for me to know I’ll see him again tomorrow for game 3 of the Calder Cup finals. Like so many other Caps’ followers, Pepper’s making the pilgrimage to Hershey this weekend. This weekend will in many ways be a rousing party among many of the friendly faces I have come to know on this blog beat of the past three years.

Pepper and I were in about five layers of clothes that fantastically frigid December weekend in Toronto; this one we’ll move about central Pa. in golf shirts and sunscreen and shades, and definitely say hello to hordes of Caps’ fans tailgating in Giant Center’s parking lot this weekend.

More importantly, we may well watch another wave of champions ripen within the Capitals’ development system.

There’s a terrifically practical and selfish reason for Caps’ fans to be excited about what’s going on with the Hershey Bears this June. The 2006 Calder Cup champion Bears featured six players now with the Caps: Tomas Fleischmann, Eric Fehr, Mike Green, Boyd Gordon, Dave Steckel, and Brooks Laich. A seventh, Jeff Schultz, earned a Hershey sweater in seven postseason games that spring. It isn’t difficult to imagine players like Oskar Osala, John Carlson, Andrew Gordon, Michal Neuvirth, Karl Alzner, and Mathieu Perreault wearing Caps’ sweaters down the road just a bit. Perhaps Chris Bourque’s among them, too. If two sizable classes of Caps’ prospects arrive in D.C. bearing Calder Cup pedigrees, within a few years of one another, how could that not bolster the Caps’ ultimate aim? 

This postseason for these Bears has already proven to be an invaluable experience in the development of their pro hockey careers. They’ve faced a bitter foe (Wilkes Barre-Scranton), against whom they stared down elimination twice, ultimately triumphing. Though their conference finals against Providence lasted just five games, all the games were tight and undecided deep into the third periods. Now they’re confronting a 50-win Manitoba club boasting the league’s best goalie. Let’s hope they win this Calder Cup, and then, beginning next season, let’s imagine Alexander Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom and Alexander Semin and Simeon Varlamov and perhaps Sergei Fedorov as the lead dogs among a kennel full of  purebreds with champions’ pedigree, all working to pull a sled in sports’ most arduous journey.    

From messages I’ve received and gleaned all about social media this week I know of so many Washingtonians making a weekend of it in Chocolatetown, where they’ll take in live championship hockey Saturday and Sunday and also ride a few roller coasters before the games. I know of members of the Capitals’ organization who are putting the kids in the car, outfitting the entire family in red, and making the trip north. There may well be a bit of a junior Red-out in Giant Center this weekend. Here’s hoping.

Bloggers will be well represented in the Giant Center press box, because the Bears see new media much the same way the parent club does. (Eric McErlain will be making his first visit, and Pepper and I are eager to show him around.) This is no small feat. The Bears, Walton told me on Thursday, are somehow going to accommodate 100-plus media credentials over the course of the next three games at Giant Center. Their press box is about one-fifth the size of Verizon Center’s.

“Including TV people and others not in press row with seats, we’re over 100 credentials for all three games already,” Walton said by email. “Only a small fraction of those are pro scouts.

“I’m not sure where everyone is going to go . . . it’s nuts,” he added.

Sensing unprecedented credentials demand, swollen by Canadian media wanting to cover Manitoba, I sent Walton a note more than a week ago informing him of my intention to purchase seats, don my red, and enjoy the show like so many others coming up from D.C. He wouldn’t have any of that.

“Your readership up here isn’t much different from the smaller papers that cover the Bears,” he shot back. “You’re here all three games.” 

Actually, I won’t be in Hershey for game 5; business travel will have me way out on the West Coast then. But I hope the Bears win the next three at home, and come Tuesday night, as soon as my business meeting wraps, that I’ll be able to race back to my hotel room and log on to John’s call deep into the East Coast night. I want to listen then to my friend inform, loud and fenzied enough for all of Pennsylvania to hear, that the Calder Cup is back where it belongs.