Still, this fall we don’t know what we most need to about this hockey club — and necessarily we can’t: How much heart, courage, confidence, and history-defying swagger will it possess next spring, when the ghosts of Washington Capitals playoffs past will want to haunt again?

So what’s to preview? What we all want to know in October 2011 is what the collective state of our hockey hearts will be next spring. We all want to know that roster adjustments and hard offseason training and finally, at long last, an exasperation with failure has settled in, and in the aggregate these factors are driving the Capitals toward a more glorious fate — one befitting their other-worldly skill, one quashing four consecutive sour endings to spring. But we can’t know that right now. So instead, we saddle up for another long season (but likely a final season of Southeast division hockey!), hoping for better things on the power play, more goals, a returned-to-form Ovi, elite goaltending, good health.

And also this: night-in, night-out character and commitment, regular occurring 60-minute efforts, pride for the crest, an identity of hard work and an earned reputation for being tough to play against. Achieving that, we in the Red Nation could pretty well allow the chips to fall where they may.

When I wonder about the fate of this year’s Washington Capitals I find myself asking questions, identifying about 10 big-picture, perhaps defining queries, the answers to which I believe will determine just how far this team will go next spring.

(1) To what extent will the Capitals successfully implement a “hybrid” system relative to the preceding two seasons, one that better utilizes the prodigious skill sets of the team’s elite talents while also bringing more lunch pail ethos and thump and snarl for the season of ugly hockey (spring)? To what extent will there be “player buy-in” for this new system, and to what extent will the team adhere to it within the cauldron of high-pressure playoff puck?

(2) Will readily identifiable leadership develop under Alexander Ovechkin — on the ice and off? There are many superstar talents in many professional sports ill-suited to roles of extraordinary leadership. In his seventh NHL season Ovechkin not only has to recapture the game-breaking production he lost last season but he must embrace the responsibilities that come with wearing the ‘C’ in his sport, and inspire his teammates in the process. They already respect him; they already acknowledge his stature in the sport. Beginning this season, Alexander Ovechkin must look the part of mature warrior, and the Capitals must look like Alexander Ovechkin’s hockey team.

(3) How big a statistical rebound will we see from Ovi? His 65 goals in 2007-08 seem an outlier, highly unlikely to be replicated ever again, but last season’s 32, relative to his talent, seem even more aberrational. In better shape, and healthier, and a lead part on an improved power play, it’s hard to imagine he doesn’t significantly improve over last season’s numbers. But by how much?

(4) Will power be restored to the power play? It was inexplicably pedestrian (16th, 17.5 percent) last season. When it slumps this team’s extra-man unit still shouldn’t fall outside of the top 10. Roman Hamrlik, a healthy Dennis Wideman and a healthy Mike Green, and a more experienced John Carlson ought to deliver a big jolt from the point. And will that bolstered blueline allow for Ovechkin to be moved back to the half-wall, where he’s clearly done more damage on the PP in his career?

(5) Will Tomas Vokoun’s longstanding regular season excellence (career .917 save pct; 2.56 goals-against) translate to the postseason, for which he has but two series’ experience (11 games total) back some years with Nashville? It’s perhaps the lone area of uncertainty with this enormous and hungry talent, who apparently turned down better offers in July to try and win a Cup in D.C. this season. His postseason numbers (.922 and 2.47) are actually stronger than his regular season ones, but he went 3-8 in those 11 games.

(6) Who will reliably win faceoffs here this year? The Capitals late last season and in the offseason bid goodbye to two of the better draw men in the entire league in Dave Steckel (62 percent in ’10-11) and Boyd Gordon (58 percent). Both Marcus Johansson and Mathieu Perreault are notably inexperienced in the art. Jeff Halpern (56 percent) should help. Two quality draw-takers need to emerge, and it would be helpful if one skated in the top 6.

(7) Is there a realm of more mature and more reliable excellence that Alexander Semin will display in what is clearly the most important year of his NHL career? He is the longest-tenured Capital today; if he fails to make improvements with respect to discipline (offensive zone and generally ill-timed penalties) and emerging as a productive scorer when the team needs it most, this is likely his last season in D.C.

(8) Much as the Capitals’ core roster has experienced growing pains in its path toward legitimate contention, so too has Head Coach Bruce Boudreau. Put bluntly: he’s underwhelmed a lot of observers with his handling of the Capitals’ recent postseasons, and in fact in the judgment of many been out-coached by less experienced bench bosses of lower-seeded clubs. This season Bruce Boudreau, too, needs to earn new regard when it matters most. Will he mature and improve as he expects his core skaters to?

(9) This hockey club’s conditioning was a hot topic during the offseason. Will this Capitals club look physically strong generally, and most especially in third periods?

(10) Don’t overlook the impact of an NBA lockout/lost season on Verizon Center especially, long a home, due to its heavy use, to one of the league’s poorer ice sheets. If there’s no NBA hoops, just how good can this ice sheet become — for a hockey team boasting many exceptional skaters and assembled to contest a fast-paced game?

Still: no summer has proven to be as ill-equipped to heal a previous hockey season’s hurt as this past one was for me. Time is supposed to heal all hurt, but as recently as August I listened closely to reflections from departed heart-and-soul Capitals’ veterans, hardly axe-grinders, and longstanding concerns I had were renewed from their views. Still, this morning, there is something healing in the air.

Hockey returns in full force this weekend, with the start of training camp, and it brings a host of hotly talked about questions related to the state of the Capitals. For the Hockey News, at least, all is well. We though who’ve lived long in Washington know better.

The Washington Capitals drafted Alexander Ovechkin no. 1 overall in 2004. That summer, I never imagined that seven years later we’d be where we are today: still disappointed.

Not just unsuccessful, but profoundly disappointed.

No one member of a hockey team, not even one of the sport’s richest captains, is singularly responsible for the premature demise of his club, but Ovi himself knows — and embraces — the unprecedented role he plays as Ambassador of Hockey in the nation’s capital. The draft lottery luck that delivered this franchise-altering talent was meant to alter miserable springs in these parts, and to date that hasn’t happened. We’re still wrestling with why, and suddenly an athlete’s calendar seems of essence.

Ovi celebrates his 26th birthday this weekend. To most observers, he’s lodged in the prime of his professional hockey career. Only twice in his six NHL seasons has he failed to record 100 points, but 2010-11, he bottomed out: 32 goals and just 85 points. By his own admission he wasn’t in shape, and for most of last season he looked slow. In 2007-08, Ovechkin scored 65 goals. We do have to ponder the possibility that we’ve seen already his very best hockey, that it’s behind him. If that’s true, what are the implications for the Caps?

Capitals’ players report for the start of training camp this weekend, and there are for me five overriding questions confronting this hockey club as it enters what may be the most important season in franchise history. I say that because one more season of conspicuous failure is virtually certain to inaugurate sweeping changes to the Capitals’ core (and perhaps beyond), the very core most of us believed would lead the team toward Stanley Cup contention.

Season-defining questions, in order of importance:

• Will we see the return of Ovi 1.0? I think we know the brand of hockey Ovi likes best to play, and here I’m not talking about systems and such. If this team fails again I’d at least like to see Capitals’ opponents pay a heavy price in victory. The Capitals of especially the past couple of seasons haven’t been all that tough to play against. They were, comparatively speaking, when Ovi was a one-man wrecking ball, dishing out thunderous, glass-shaking (and clean) hits. And opponents — even big-bodied blueliners — gave him deference. By about year five of his career it became vogue in media circles to opine that Ovechkin’s brute physical style wasn’t suited to last in this league. Well, I’ve seen the alternative — Ovi in a trap, Ovi in a hybrid trap, Ovi floating, Ovi manning the power play point, and I’m underwhelmed. Ovi is at his best (and most exciting) when he skates as the proverbial bull in a china shop. Bruce Boudreau suggested this summer that he will again tweak his system to allow for a greater attack ethos. So: free Ovi in the process, I say, and make our opponents pay. And roster additions on the order of Troy Brouwer and Joel Ward bolster the hopes for a more physical brand of hockey in red this season.

• Is Ovi truly ready and fit to lead? There is the risk of making too much of the parting comments from Matt Bradley, ones echoed in their entirety days later by Dave Steckel, but there is also the risk of ignoring them altogether. Brads intimated that Ovi’s leadership — on and off the ice — required maturation. We ought to see if there’s been any if he reports fit for duty this weekend.

• Will there be a culture of accountability? Elusive in recent seasons: Sixty minutes of committed, character play. The bench got shortened, Brads suggested, even when front-line performers weren’t performing. Perhaps worse: there was a tiered system of accountability with practices, too — big-money guys were gone from grunt-work under suspicious circumstances. The head coach has to address this, beginning this weekend. Call it a lunch-pail ethos, call it crafting a blue-collar identity — I call it skating nightly with pride for the crest you wear — but the Capitals this season need to intimidate with work ethic and passion. They need to give Washington hockey fans 60 minutes of effort. I’m of the school that suggests that such commitment bears directly on what hockey in spring looks like. Accountability, too, confronts the coach. Perhaps Bruce Boudreau, unlike a few of his younger new coaching peers, has had to learn on the job in the NHL. His evolution into a quality bench maestro must arrive now. There simply can be no more game-costing screwups with line changes, no more deer-in-headlight looks as momentum sways the other way in the postseason.

• Is the Capitals contending core tired of failure? Are these highly skilled guys through talking tough with training camp t-shirt slogans and willing to pay the price required of NHL success? If they are, I suspect we’ll see fewer Tweet pics of night-before-games jaunts about town slinging back the Jagermeister.

• And last but not least, the ever-enduring enigma, Sasha Semin. We know what Matt Bradley thinks of him — the same as a good many Capitals’ fans. I listened all summer long to friends in media swear to me that Alexander Semin had to be traded for this team to prosper. I swore to them that (1) even if they were right, his contract (and reputation) is untradable; and (2) that George McPhee, aware of how difficult it was for this team to score last season, and how conspicuously it struggled with the power play, was going to cast his lot one last time with the world-class but oh so infuriating right wing. Alexander Semin is one of hockey’s greatest mysteries. But in the fall of 2011, it’s clear the Caps are going to live with that mystery at least one more season.

These are my big-picture wonderings heading into a new season. What are yours?

These teams certainly have respect for one another, but also, they truly hate each other. And in hockey, hate is a very good trait. It’s a rivalry that now extends to the formation of colorful and highly energized fanbases creating a big-game aura in the respective cities that host the showdowns.

Likely January’s Winter Classic upped the stakes between these clubs forever more. There was plenty of dislike for each other on New Years Day: fairly early on, Erskine and Rupp dropped the gloves; you had Ovi’s face-wash of Sidney Crosby that left the Pittsburgh captain helmetless; in the aftermath of Dave Steckel’s (clean) hit on the Pittsburgh captain, which likely inaugurated his present concussion, fresh controversy was birth; and of course the Penguins’ failure to meet the Caps at center ice for an end-of-game handshake. We saw the hate come out again today, although in a much less honorable way.

Hockey has time-honored codes, such as: you do something questionable, something of a physical nature that skirts the line of sanctionable, you better be expected to reckon for it. Dave Steckel knew that, and you can debate until the end of time whether or not his New Years Day hit on Crosby was clean or not, but Stecks answered the challenge he was issued by Tim Wallace on Sunday. It was far from a classic bout, but Stecks met the moment. It was the honorable way to do things, adherence to one of hockey’s codes. Too bad Matt Cooke does not share that same sense of honor.

With time winding down in the third period and the game out of reach for the Penguins, Cooke took yet another cheap shot against one of hockey’s elite performers. The circumstances surrounding it — its timing so late in an already decided game, its target, and Cooke’s status as a repeat offender, all appropriately drew censure from the objective observers in the Verizon Center press box. There are hits to the head which are bad and there are the hits along the boards, when opposing skaters are uniquely vulnerable, that are especially dirty, but there is no hit more dishonorable and more ghastly than the knee-on-knee collision. It’s so anti-hockey. And it is a potential career-ender. That is the exact type of hit Cooke decided to deliver on Ovechkin, and it remains to be seen if the league will sanction Cooke as it should — at long last.

From the black and white side of things, it was called a trip. Cooke earned two minutes in the box. In Bruce Boudreau’s eyes after the game, though, there was no doubt about the insidious aspect of Cooke’s action.

“It’s Matt Cooke, need we say more?” Boudreau exclaimed after the game with his hands raised. “It’s not like it’s his first rodeo. He’s done it to everybody, and then he goes to the ref and says ‘what’d I do’? He knows damn well what he did.

While it was a dirty hit, Cooke could have at least stood up and done the honorable thing after his two minute “tripping,” read kneeing, penalty, and answered hockey’s call for atonement. He had a perfect opportunity to with Matt Bradley coming over the boards and approaching him like a lion on a gazelle. Instead of acquiescing Bradley’s request to tango he skated hard for his bench. Punk. A punk who should be punished — by the league this week, and especially by the Capitals in the teams’ fourth and final meeting this regular season.

These two teams bear an increasing respect-hate for each other because they are both clamoring after the same thing, the Stanley Cup, but the respect aspect of the equation suffers from hits like Matt Cooke’s on Sunday. Until he owns up to it — until the league makes him own up for it — I wouldn’t be surprised if Ovi didn’t take an extra few steps before laying the hurt on him in a few weeks when these two teams meet again. And my bet is he’d do so cleanly.