I dreaded the elevator ride down to the Capitals’ dressing room at 10:07 p.m. last night. Jubilation, as we in HockeyWashington certainly learned this spring, is a damned fun thing to chronicle and consume, and for the first time it seemed in all of 2008, I had to cover jubilation’s juxtaposition — gut-wrenching, sudden and season-ending defeat.
One that just didn’t quite seem merited.
To reach the Cap’s room I had to pass through a corridor containing the spillover of a Game 7’s jubilation. In pro sports’ postseasons there are of course victors and the vanquished, and of course they share a wing of seclusion in resolution’s aftermath, but for me there was something searing and jarring about seeing so wildly divergent a set of reactions separated by just about 75 feet. And one man’s whistle.
Among the teeming press horde that packed Verizon Center last night most already have or soon will focus their coverage on a white-knuckler of a Game 7 that could have gone either way and was ultimately decided, on a controversial power play, by a Joffrey Lupul goal 6 minutes and change into sudden death, the home team left stunned about the ice and bench. I however feel compelled to report this: two gutsy and talented hockey teams that showed no signs of fatigue from a bruising and emotionally draining affair in another city the previous night and who played six-and-nine-tenths of a seven-game series as tightly and evenly as any in recent playoff memory, deserved to have their series outcome determined in precisely the manner that hockey long ago deemed appropriate in such circumstances.
Which is markedly different from what transpired at Verizon Center late Tuesday night, under the auspices of Mssrs. Koharski and Devorski.
In the second period, on the type of play that just earlier this month against Tampa overturned a goal earned by the Caps, Philadelphia’s Patrick Thoresen shoved Shaone Morrisonn into Cristobal Huet, taking the Caps’ netminder out of the play, allowing Flyer Sami Kapenen an open net into which he gave the Flyers a 2-1 lead. Huet told the media after the game that he thought a penalty could have been called on the play. Still, his team had plenty of time remaining to recover. Eventually, deep in period two, Alexander Ovechkin did tie it up.
Huet and his teammates then played the type of third period Bruce Boudreau couldn’t have scripted any better. They won faceoffs. They peppered Martin Biron with 16 shots while holding Philly to fewer than 5. They controlled the puck in the Flyers’ zone for long stretches. All four Caps’ lines took turns responding to the Rockin’ House of the Red’s loudest urgings.
They did just about everything right. It just wasn’t good enough.
“We couldn’t find the back of the net before them,” Huet said in his customarily quiet postgame voice.
Martin Biron, who looked so unsteady as Monday night’s game 6 got tighter and tougher, rebounded big time Tuesday night, stopping 39 of the 41 shots the Caps sent his way, including all 16 in the penalty-free third period.
The Caps’s Sergei Fedorov was whistled for tripping at 2:52 of period two, and the game’s referees wouldn’t identify another infraction against the home club until 4:15 of overtime.
A camera panned in on the red-sweatered owner seconds after Lupul’s rebound score ended Washington’s season, and in the Capitals’ locker room afterward the owner was asked what at that moment was going through his head.
“I was disappointed for the fans and for the players who worked so hard. I was disappointed that we lost with a man in the penalty box. I didn’t hear the whistle blow at all tonight after the puck dropped for the third period.
“That’s the way the game goes,” he added.
“Even though people were disappointed in the outcome of the game, they were not disappointed in hockey,” Leonsis noted. “The vibe is so positive [in Washington] right now, as it should be.”
“This is a young, beautiful team that only has unlimited upside. We can keep this team together, that’s been the goal, and this team is worthy of being kept together.
“I don’t think anyone can say we’re still rebuilding,” he added.
In a season in which this Capitals’ team had given so much feel-good buzz to its league, the hardware for which will arrive in just a few weeks’ time, and captured the hockey hearts in Russia, Canada, and elsewhere about the globe, it seemed like they deserved a better send off than the one the league authored and authorized Tuesday night.
Bruce Boudreau afterward was asked what he told his team in a room full of silent dejection.
“I told them they gave me the best year of my life.”
I’d like to thank these Capitals and their coaches for giving me the best season of hockey here in my 34 years of following them.
