photo by On Frozen Blog

I watched John Carlson skate around Giant Center ice in the early moments of his team’s Calder title celebration Monday night with a cell phone to his ear, his eyes scanning the stands, and in that moment I thought of another Captain America in skates, Jim Craig, 30 years earlier, and his iconic search for his father in the stands at Lake Placid, American flag draped over his shoulders.

That image of Craig overpowers the rest of that aspect of his story, doesn’t it — all these years later I can’t quite remember if and when he found his father in the Olympic rink that day. Well, John Carlson had no trouble locating his family Monday night; they joined him on the ice moments later, and I was fortunate enough to meet them. The mother of Captain America 2010 emailed me a few times this past season, expressing appreciation for our coverage, but Monday night she was overseas on business, I learned from her sister and John’s stepfather. In mom’s absence the rest of the family offered me hearty handshakes and warm words that I’ll carry with me all summer long.

Standing among the Carlson clan I wondered how many hockey games young Carlson had played over the course of 2009-10, and his stepfather told me, “Tonight makes one hundred and one — not counting the World Juniors!” I got tired just thinking about such a slate.

Family is so central to the development of hockey players, and in this apex moment in hockey Monday it struck me as powerfully appropriate, and wonderfully warming, to see so much family out on that ice sheet, sharing embraces, exchanging kisses, holding and squeezing hands, laughing gleefully and most especially savoring and securing the moment with hand-helds directed at their brothers, sons, boyfriends, and husbands in skates.

Ray Bourque stood out prominently among the throng of family and girlfriends and friends gathered around the jubilant Bears. Chris’ younger brother Ryan, himself a gifted hockey player, was on the ice as well. The Bourque men bear a striking resemblance to one another. I was able to snap a photo of the Bourques gathered around Chris holding his just-earned Calder Cup playoff MVP trophy.

All forms of media were on the ice amid the celebration, and with respect to those on hard deadline, I could understand their need to interrupt the camaraderie and exuberance to get reaction, but I made a point of trying to remain a bit on the periphery and carefully and respectfully pick my spots to engage players and their families. I found Andrew Gordon alone for a moment and I told him that if things don’t work out in his hockey playing career he had a star candidacy as a hockey blogger. He got a good laugh out of that. If you didn’t follow the finals diary he kept for the wonderful blog Russian Machine Never Breaks, do yourself a favor and start at its beginning and enjoy Gordo’s prose gift to Hershey and Washington hockey fans that followed each game.

Among all the images of family and loving support I bore witness to within that jubilation scene Monday night the most indelible was that exhibited by sports’ best band of brothers: unleashed elation, teammate upon teammate. It was unbridled and boundless and beautiful. Its sound was so striking — banshee screams of glee, nickname to nickname, followed by what appeared to be bruising hugs. All unrehearsed of course, all so organic, and yet also seemingly so orchestrated in its fluid joy.

There was one other family prominently portrayed in the title-glow of Giant Center Monday night — thousands of Bears’ supporters on the other side of the plexiglass. Perhaps a dozen Bears’ players skated along the boards during the celebration and pointed hand-helds at their admirers, a hockey team and hockey town at one in passion and elation.

photo by On Frozen Blog

photo by On Frozen Blog

photo by On Frozen Blog

photo by On Frozen Blog

photo by On Frozen Blog

nateewell Who will be the first ice-level TV guy to jump out and help his home team? I got $ on Bob Errey.

dcsportschick What’s funnier, that the Caps are up 7-1 or that Crosby is resting his groin?

JohnMKeeley Department of Homeland Security needed in Philly: #Caps going Al Qaeda on Flyers

cmasisak22 Oh my god — a referee just got hit in the face with the puck and this place erupted in cheers. Pathetic.

brettleonhardt Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Not Dec. 5th 2009

kaaaali I bet my neighbors wonder what is going on in my apartment when I’m clapping and screaming “Yesssss!” or ”Noooo!” during a #Caps game. #NHL

JapersRink Semin’s biggest defenders like to martyr themselves and think everyone’s out to get their guy. It’s simply not true and not that simplistic.

jwaltonhockey Bears win 5-4, Chris Bourque number one star of the game with two goals and an assist. http://bit.ly/8y8uYN

VogsCaps Anyone remember a rash of “Gordie Howe must change” or “Mark Messier must change stories back in the day? Yeah, me neither. Grab a tissue.

dcsportsbog GMGM on Ovechkin: “I’m glad he’s not pulling back. He’ll learn to pick his spots a little bit…but I’m glad he’s defiant.”

brettleonhardt Shout out to @akeesee820 for being my 80th follower. If @akeesee820 can tell why 80 is so important you got two tickets to an upcoming game.

nateewell Don’t look now, but @GreenLife52 has 25% more points than any other Canadian d-man

timleone Caps just announced they reclaimed Chris Bourque and assigned him to Hershey.

DanaWalker_chat Will Joe B. & Locker FINALLY discuss food and/or their moms tonight? I think so… #caps

dchesnokov Bengt-Åke Gustafsson is considering coaching a KHL club if he doesn’t carry on coaching Team Sweden. A few KHL clubs show interest.

bmcnally14 Matt Bradley in 81 games last year: 5 goals. Matt Bradley in 28 games this year: 5 goals.

cmasisak22 Crosby: “You can’t judge guys on one hit. Some guys see suspensions as something they learn from. Other guys brush it off and do it again.”

dchesnokov A rare sighting. Too rare. RT @SlavaKM I just saw M.Nylander practice alone at Rockville rink wearing full NYR gear and Jagr jersey.

nateewell All lies. This interview is making him look even more deceitful, dishonest, biased and wrong.

nateewell I think I might have lost a Dick Dillman vote today.

HockeyWashington, alighted in vigil, needing good news about a Russian knee

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• Karl Alzner
• Chris Bourque
• Sami Lepisto
• Graham Mink

No official word on who among these farm-purging call-ups will be in tonight’s lineup.

Update: per Tarik, the Capitals have assigned Chris Clark (broken arm) and Jeff Schultz (broken finger) to the Long-Term IR, which  means they’ll be out for a minimum of 10 games. It also clears approximately $3.4 million in cap space for the Hershey crew.

Update: per Corey, the Capitals retroactively placed Alexander Semin and Mike Green on the injured reserve and are able to be removed on Friday.

“The [development] system rewards those parents who are able to time a pregnancy to begin in the spring and come to its happy fruition in the early months of the new year. Hockey registration, you see, goes by the calendar year, and each child born in a given year is considered the same age for purposes of setting age limits. Yet a child born, say, on Wayne Gretzky’s birthday of January 26 is likely to be a better player on the first day of hockey tryouts than a player born on December 25 of the same year. The January child is almost a year older, a year stronger and more mature. At age six or seven this represents an enormous advantage, the January child being nearly one-sixth or one-seventh older . . .

“The older child has the best chance to be the first star of the game, to develop a star’s skills and attitude and expectations of success. The younger child — smaller, weaker — must first learn to cope and later, when the age difference matters less (for example, at fourteen the same January child is only one-fourteenth older), he is often unable to undo his and others’ expectations, reprogram himself, put to one side his coping skills for a star’s skills, and become a star. The same situation and problem exists, of course, in the schools.

“If streaming came at a later age, the effect of birthdates would be largely outgrown. But streaming comes early in hockey.”

And, Dryden claims, streaming in hockey is destiny.

“From age nine onward,” he writes, “better players get streamed into competitive teams, and the competitive teams get the better coaches and more ice time . . . the gap between the mediocre nine-year-old and the gifted nine-year-old begins to widen, and widen fast. In Canadian minor hockey in the late 1980s, if you don’t make it by age nine, you likely won’t make it at all.”

Not quite Darwinian, is it? Or is it? At this point, you’re probably wondering, do Canadian (and Minnesotan) (and Scandinavian) families actually so family plan? Were the question put to Dryden, I’m rather sure he’d answer, “Not if, but in what volume?”

Next I decided to check birthdays for some high profile hockey stars — specifically, those residing in the 500 NHL goals scored club. The results were startling. Limiting my search just to those who’ve scored 500 goals and were born in January and February, these names loom large: Gretz; Bobby Hull; Phil Esposito; Mike Bossy; Mark Messier; Frank Mahovlich; Peter Bondra; Brendan Shanahan; Jeremy Roenick; Lanny McDonald; Joey Mullen; Dino Ciccarelli; Jaromir Jagr.

Blackhawks’ coach Denis Savard hovers just a bit outside of 500 goals scored in his career, but he was born in February. Were I to have broadened my search to include births in the first quarter of the calendar year, the list would have expanded appreciably — Gordie Howe, for instance, was born in the first week of March in 1928.

Now, you don’t want to get carried away with the intriguing pattern of hockey family planning, because in truth studs and stars are born in all 12 months of the calendar. Alexander Ovechkin, for instance, is a September baby. Mario Lemieux was born in October. One of the greatest skaters the game has even seen, Gilbert Perreault, was born in November. Sergei Fedorov arrived as an early delivery from Santa’s sleigh (December).

But Dryden’s observations are so illuminating precisely because hockey streams as it does and because relative to other youth sports, vital skill sets in hockey (including cognitive and emotional accumen) seem to take root in player development so early . . . partly, Dryden would argue (I think), because of the streaming. Baseball and soccer, for instance, hold their respective tryouts in the spring, rendering the calendar inconsequential to the physical and emotional maturity of youth registrants in those sports.

Football, interestingly enough, registers players in the final¬†season of the calendar, like hockey, but perhaps partly because tackle football really is a high school endeavor for most pigskinners, little that is determinative in a player’s development¬†occurs on the gridiron at the age of seven, eight or nine. Or twelve, for that matter: football talent evaluators typically hone in on kids when they’re high school juniors and seniors and have just begun to immerse themselves in the weight room. And really, it’s only after a couple of years of college football that players earn the status of pro prospect.

It’s none of our business, of course, but it is fun to wonder: did Ray and Mrs. Bourque consider father’s own development arc in Canadian minor hockey early on as they started their family, or did they merely get swept up in a particularly schmaltzy movie on Lifetime one chilly March night twenty-some-odd years ago?

1. Michal Neuvirth. (Yes he played only half the game, but he was that good.)
2. The Perreault-Bouchard combo
3. Mike Green
4. Mike Denney, Caps’ season ticket holder, visitor this past weekend to Portland, Maine, from whence he returned with a 12-pack of Shipyard seasonal — one of America’s great microbrews — and presented it to moi before noon Monday. Now that’s a way to start a vacation. Incidentally, there is no sign at Kettler that reads, ‘Do Not Feed the Bloggers Beer.’ Just sayin.