For nearly two years now I’ve had a recurring wonder related to righting the frustrating and infuriating underachievement by the Washington Capitals of this era: What would happen if this band of multi-millionaires suddenly had to share a room with a legend, an authentic legend, who wore the team crest; a true warrior whose number resides in the rafters of Verizon Center, whose honor mural conspicuously adorns one end of the team’s training facility; the scorer of what most Caps’ fans regard as the biggest goal in team history, a luminary who once lifted the Prince of Wales trophy high over his head? That for me was what was biggest about Monday’s stop-the-presses news — we’re about to watch my dream scenario play out.

It’s a dream scenario that hardly belongs to me alone. By noon Monday I’d received a text from a chum in Ashburn, Va., who reported seeing not one but two Dale Hunter Capitals sweaters adorning shoppers in his neighborhood grocery store. We had unseasonably excellent weather Monday for sweater exhibition, but still I found this anecdote, taking place in a single enclave of our region, remarkable. We awoke Monday with the post-holiday dread of return to our life of labor, only to spit out our first sip of coffee as the wire (The wire? I meant to type Twitter) broke word of the Legend’s return.

Bondra is a legend, Kolzig is a legend, but this is the Legend of Washington hockey. Captain Legend. Coming home. To help. When we need it most.

Remarkable.

Millionaires, all too accustomed to having their hockey hearts questioned, on Monday morning met the biggest hockey heart HockeyWashington has ever known. Christmas, indeed.

The Dale Hunter Era begins in Washington this week as an experiment, and I say that not with any overriding sense of doubt attached to the announcement but rather out of acknowledgment that nothing remotely like this has ever been tried here before. We’ve never had one of our own, an oh so distinguished alum, return home to help out in a leadership crisis. The Caps are Cup-less perhaps partially because theirs has been a bench populated, for nearly 40 years, by merely good and decent bench bosses, mostly very mediocre ones, and one or two less than mediocre men. Washington has not been a cradle of great hockey coaching. Far from it. Pittsburgh has enjoyed Badger Bob Johnson, Scotty Bowman, and now Dan Bylsma. We’ve had the Murray brothers, Shoeney and Wils and Gabby and Glen. . . and Butch Cassidy.

We won’t know for years where Dale Hunter falls in the litany, but at this moment this hire seems quite more than special, quite more than novel. To no small extent it seems to represent a vindication of Washington’s hockey legacy, modest though that be. It also seems like a terrific tonic for these troubled times; these Washington Capitals seriously need boots meeting their behinds, and the Dale Hunter kick ought to occasion some giddyup alright.

Monday at Kettler seemed especially about the Legend offering testimonials to his love affair for his Caps. “This has been my team — I shouldn’t say my team, it’s Ted’s team — but it feels like my team because I played here so long and had good memories here,” the Legend said.

‘Have you been able to follow much the team since you’ve been gone,’ a reporter asked the Legend. Only in the sense of taping and watching every Capitals game played since he left. Long bus rides in major juniors, you know; good way to kill all those hours, watching every game for the team you captained and left . . . the decade before last. “I’ve been cheering for the Caps since I left here,” Captain Legend admitted.

‘Were you a tough sell?’ another scribe wondered. Well before this moment word was in wide circulation among the Kettler hockey press that Huntsy had turned down overtures from other NHL organizations, out of fidelity to ours.

photo by OFB

“It would take the Washington Capitals to get me to stop doing what I was doing [in London],” the Legend said.

“This is the only [NHL] team he’s ever wanted to coach,” George McPhee told the mass of media enveloping him.

It didn’t come up during any of the press conferences Monday, but it’s part of the Hunter lore, and I remember it as much as any play in his remarkable career: Dale Hunter never hired an agent during his 19-year career, or at least certainly not while in Washington. Instead, once a year, at the end of each hockey season, he sat down with Mr. Pollin, briefly discussed his value to the club, quickly reached an accord, and made a new pact . . . on a handshake.

* * * * *

The St. Louis Blues are in the midst of their own honeymoon with new leadership. They’re hot under Hitch: 7-1-2 since he took over three weeks ago. I thought it remarkable that the Blues took to Kettler ice opposite the Capitals right as Dale Hunter was taking his first paces in his coaches warmup. Talk about a team seemingly walking into a Chinatown buzzsaw this week. A couple of Blues players even poked their heads in the other side of the rink to behold the spectacle of the Legend’s return.

* * * * *

Monday also delivered a brutal bittersweetness the likes of which I doubt I’ll ever encounter again. Bruce Boudreau’s dismissal necessarily delivered a deep bruise to that great hockey community just to our north. NHL rookie John Walton believes he’s in the big leagues today because of Bruce Boudreau. So you imagine his emotions on Monday. JW got to share about 10 weeks of the Dream with his advocate-friend, before having to say goodbye. On Monday he brought important perspective to the Boudreau legacy in D.C.:

“I learned of Bruce’s dismissal this morning around 8:00 a.m. As I drove into Arlington, I listened to the coverage of the coaching change on WTOP when a sad irony hit me. On Washington’s most listened to radio station this morning, the coverage of the coaching change was wall-to-wall. News at the top of the hour. Fan reaction on the talk back line. Sports at :15 and :45 was almost all Capitals. Joe Beninati on in the 9:00 a.m. hour . . . This happened on a Monday during football season. The Redskins won a football game yesterday, and there was almost no mention of it today. Has that ever happened around here?”

No, it hasn’t. Bruce Boudreau helped build this hockey town. Dale Hunter is elated to be here because he remembers well Washington’s ordinary status in this league of 15 years ago, and how extraordinary our standing is today. He’d be the first to acknowledge Gabby’s role in getting us there.

Camp convened with perhaps only one roster spot genuinely open and available among the top nine forward spots (second line center) (or is it first?). It was pursued by a small assembly of center ice men who came to be known as ‘The Bubble Boys.’  But even with this storyline the drama didn’t build greatly, as Mathieu Perreault emerged early and decisively as the top performer. He led the Caps in scoring during the preseason. And after Sunday night’s camp-concluding exhibition game against Chicago, Bruce Boudreau said of no. 85, “I think our best player all of camp was Perreault. I think he played with energy every night.” On the radio last night, Mike Vogel was similarly impressed: “He’s been consistently good throughout the preseason regardless of which line he’s been on.”

The forward ranks offered this camp its exclusive intrigue, and that was muted drama. On the blueline, the top six were set before camp started, and likewise, the Capitals’ net was set before training camp’s first conditioning whistle blew.

This drama-free state of affairs was by design. In the middle of the offseason the GM overhauled his roster heavily for size and grit and experience up front on the wings, some character and a former captain’s experience and leadership to center the fourth line, and then the ultimate offseason coup — Tomas Vokoun. Offseason changer, that.  Training camp quickly became more a dress rehearsal than an audition.

Camp’s top storylines:

• As important as McPhee’s offseason roster moves were, it was what the GM did at his office keyboard while the wounds of another short postseason were still raw that likely set in motion the business-like tenor of this training camp. At camp’s dawning the Washington Post reported that early in the offseason that Capitals’ players were issued a written warning about changed expectations for fitness for duty come September:

” . . . players received letters early this summer warning them to expect an Albert Haynesworth-like timed fitness test with controlled recovery intervals at the start of camp.’

That was George McPhee the enforcer enforcing a culture change for his hockey club. Overdue, in my opinion. May it be the last time Albert Haynesworth’s name is evoked in connection with the Capitals.

• More on the conditioning/work ethic/maturation front: Ben Raby, writing for the Toronto Star, got captain Ovechkin to concede that his 2010-11 showing wasn’t up to par on a number of fronts. He approached last season looking past its regular season toward the postseason, and sacrificed his conditioning in the process. His owner took note:

“He tried something different,” Caps owner Ted Leonsis said. “He wanted to work his way into shape so that he would peak during the playoffs.”

Indeed, Ovechkin admitted that all year he “just wanted to be ready for the playoffs.

“I was starting, like, in the middle (of the season) to be in shape.”

• Vitally important testimony attesting to the Capitals fall-time fitness arrived at the dawn of training camp, from team strength and conditioning coach Mark Nemish.  “I already know [Ovi's] in shape; I can tell. “We’ve worked several times on the ice and, without a doubt, he’s in the best shape I’ve ever seen him.”

• The kiss or death . . . or well considered wooing?: The Hockey News tabbed the Caps as 2012 Stanley Cup champions.

• The GM sure likes his hockey club. At CapsCon, he told the assembled thousands that this year’s squad reminded him very much of the ’97-’98 club — the one that advanced to the Stanley Cup finals. “It’s going to be a hard team to play against. Maybe not as offensive, but more physical.” Superb coverage of CapsCon from the Examiner’s Michael Hoffman here.

• If the Caps hoped that Vokoun would inspire Michal Neuvirth it appears early on to have worked. Neuvy was especially strong this preseason. There may not be the 60-20 split in games between the two that a lot of folks thought about three weeks ago.

• McPhee also chimed in on realignment, all but stating that 2011-12 would be, mercifully, the final season for the Southeast division. What it’s looking like now: two 15-team conferences with 8- and 7-team divisions within. Apparently a popular plan would see the Capitals reunited with the New York clubs and the Flyers in a division. I say, why go halfway — get the best rivalry in all of hockey, and one of the best in all of sports, rekindled as well. Anyway, when it’s official, OFB I think will host a realignment party in town, where we’ll give away NASCAR posters and coupons for Waffle House. And certainly we’ll have a Gary Bettman pinata.

• Netgate.

• Camp standout: Dmitri Orlov. Still with the team partially because of John Erskine’s rehab, but also because he’s played with poise and impact that belie his years this preseason. Stock seriously on the rise.

• Camp standout, on the air: John Walton. If you haven’t given much thought to following Caps hockey on the radio in recent years, you should now.

• One of the biggest stirs in camp perhaps came with the team in Chicago for a game, and when red, white, and blue old timers returned to Kettler for the organization’s first-ever alumni game. Old timers Alan May and Kevin Kaminski drew blood from dropped gloves. I got a good chuckle from learning that Killer had earned the first-ever Alumni Game’s first-ever first star of the game designation.

• Don’t overlook this sidebar to the new season: the trading of Semyon Varlamov delivered to the Caps Colorado’s first-rounder next June. McPhee really likes the ’12 draft — it’s much stronger than this past June’s, he intimated at CapsCon. You might want to take a look at where Adam Proteau has the ‘Lanche finishing out West this season.

What might this season’s lines look like?

Ovi – Backstrom – Brouwer

Semin – MJ90/Perreault – Knuble

Chimera – Laich – Ward

Hendricks – Halpern – Beagle

Love those third and fourth lines.

The new radio voice of the Washington Capitals looks great in red, doesn't he?

I trace my passion for puck in Washington back to the 1970s, and Ron Weber’s radio calls of Caps’ games on WTOP. Radio men in hockey back then — most particularly in this region of the world — had a novel responsibility to be the eyes and ears for hockey fans unable to be inside the arena, as televised hockey outside of historic markets was virtually non-existent. In non-traditional markets these men were tasked with bringing alive an alien game for novice listenerships. Ron Weber’s enshrinement in hockey’s Hall of Fame is a powerful acknowledgment of his ability to do precisely that.

One of my most cherished recollections from winter nights in my youth was surreptitiously following Weber’s late-night calls from the West Coast while in bed, the audio on my clock radio low enough so as not to be detected by my parents when they poked a head in my bedroom to check on me. The rare Capitals’ victories out there made the fatigue at school the next morning oh so worthwhile.

Like pretty much every other novice puckhead in these parts, I’d transitioned to following hockey fairly exclusively on television by the middle 1980s as Home Team Sports emerged to help bring the game alive visually. My father by then had secured Capitals’ season tickets, and so while my appreciation for Weber’s work waned not a bit, my reliance upon him for game results diminished. Interesting note, though: Dad and I made a practice of being among the first in flight out of Capital Centre in order to get to the car and turn on Weber in time to catch his postgame recap, and most especially, on nights when the bounces went our guys’ way, to hear the iconic play-by-play voice announce, “It’s been a two-point night, Caps’ fans.”

More recently, the Capitals’ perpetual struggles with spring afforded me opportunities to follow on line and up in the Giant Center press box another distinctive and oh-so-impassioned play-by-play voice — that of the Hershey Bears’ John Walton. As the Capitals were transitioning from league doormat to contender, it was compelling for me to chronicle the development of young talent plucked from high in NHL entry drafts and apprenticing in Hershey. But quickly I realized that with Walton there was a future impact NHL talent as well; his was a perfectly pitched passion, idiosyncratically distinctive from Weber for sure but identical in his call’s ability to bring a game alive for a listener. He paints you a picture of the action with his narration. Just as importantly, he wears his hockey heart on his sleeve with his audio storytelling. The image I have of Walton’s work in Hershey was of him most often standing in his booth, his eyes glued on the action, his eyes, and his heart, telling you the night’s story. Hockey, I believe, is meant to be communicated with passion; no one is hockey knows this better than John Walton. In being engrossed with Walton’s calls I recognized a latent charm from my youth. His game calls for me were a variant on ‘That ’70s Show’ — except on radio.

A couple of times I was afforded run-ins with Walton while following the Bears on the road up in New England, and it was then that I first developed an appreciation for the breadth, and new age savviness, of his work. By about 30 minutes at the conclusion of road games Walton needed to have completed his postgame wrap-up on air, packed up an impressive hauling of broadcast gear, and be on the team bus for a swift departure for the next port of call. But seated on the team bus Walton’s work was renewed, not ended,while surrounding Bears players devoured pizzas, napped or engaged with various recreational electronica. Walton went to work filing game stories for the team web site, uploading audio calls for dissemination to his media list, and seizing the reins of social media well before it was in vogue to do so.

Then something far better than mere appreciation developed between us: friendship. It takes a special friend to maneuver me as John did for game 6 of the Calder Cup finals at Giant Center in 2010: credentialed to be down on the ice amid the euphoric champion Bears, my tiny camera capturing video and stills of Bears’ players in never-ending embraces with family. That night remains the highpoint highlight of my blogging experience.

In recent years John has shared with me his dream of calling games in the big league, and always I told my friend: your talent is too large, your passion too irresistible for it not to happen. It would just be a matter of time.

This week, perhaps as early as today, my friend behind the microphone — and every bit as adept seated before a laptop — will be announced as the next radio voice of the Washington Capitals. A miserably long and hot D.C. summer suddenly has delivered a soothing, pond-freezing sort of breeze.

Safe wager here: John Walton will be much, much more than a radio voice to the Capitals’ communications regime.

A good month and a half ago I shared with John a crossed-finger strategy for invigorating my hockey blogging pursuits. I told him that I was weary of the routine of the Verizon Center press box, the ritual of making seem meaningful nice regular seasons that always yielded to infuriating and at times inexplicable postseason sourness. I told my friend that if he got the callup to D.C. that I would spend the entirety of the 2011-12 hockey season at home, following his calls on the radio while silently watching the television broadcast, and thereby renewing my passion for the game in much the same way it was first ignited, three decades ago.

As summer yields to autumn my hockey heart needs still a fresh infusion of passion, and John Walton is precisely the right guy to make it happen.

When that game-ending horn sounds early Sunday evening back at Giant Center, what do you imagine the line will be like of Bears’ skaters awaiting submersion in training room whirlpools? And how about Walton’s voice come next Sunday? I’m guessing the Bears might take next Monday off.

This grind, all of it of course by bus, makes Dmitri Orlov’s commitment to beginning his North American pro hockey career late this winter all the more impressive, no? One wonders if General Manager Doug Yingst didn’t in fact hide the team’s March itinerary from the prospect and his agent during their discussions last month.

Walton told me he couldn’t recall such a slate in all his years in the ‘A.’ Neither could Patriot News Bears’ beat reporter Tim Leone, who’s been covering the league for more than 15 years. Three-game weekends are the norm; occasionally there’ll be four-in-five. But seven in nine? Guys who work in the American League understandably roll their eyes when the word ‘fatigue’ is uttered in association with the NHL’s two games in two nights slate.

More fun with labor on the junior circuit: The Bears have utilized seven goalies thus far on the ’10-11 campaign. Actually dressed eight. They started the season with Braden Holtby and Dany Sabourin, and because of injuries they’ve gone through three of the backstops from the Caps’ ECHL affiliate, the Stingrays (Todd Ford, Shane Owen, Jared DeMichiel). Sabourin’s been on the shelf since early February with a knee injury that required surgery. Semyon Varlamov did a conditioning stint up there. Nolan Schaeffer arrived on loan from Providence just this past weekend.

Things got real interesting the Saturday before last, when Varlamov went down in D.C. and both Holtby and Sabourin were sidelined. The Caps signed and recalled Ford for their game on Long Island. Hershey, which like Washington had a game that night, was left with a single fit goalie at 1:30 Saturday afternoon, facing a 7:00 faceoff. They tapped Bobby Jarosz, securing him on an ATO contract. Jarosz earlier this season was in net in the Central Hockey League for the Arizona Sundogs. The Bears knew him from his stint in Reading with the ECHL Royals.

And had Jarosz been unavailable? According to the Bears, they’d have been forced to ATO a netminder from HPA tenant Lebanon Valley College.

The funniest part about Saturday, February 26, and we can say this since both the Bears and Caps won that night: had Brett Leonhardt still been with the Capitals organization it would have been highly likely that he’d have been summoned to dress as backup for the Bears that night. And you just know Leonhardt Bears sweaters would have been purchased in bulk the following week.

There are old school discomforts with skates like this past Friday’s — Bears’ players, for instance, must carry off all preparations for practice at Giant Center, hop in their cars already geared up, and drive over to the old barn. But there’s something old school endearing about the sight of contemporary pro hockey players moving about a park in theirs pads and practice sweaters, largely emptied gear bags slung over their shoulders, sticks in hand.

One of HPA’s many charms is the accessibility Hershey hockey fans have to Bears’ players after practice. Fans coming into the arena to get their skates sharpened share arena hallways with the pros. In the primary entrance to the arena fans can and do wait with sweaters and photos for player signatures, and can walk alongside the pros as they make their way from the dressing room out to their cars. One fan on Friday brought along one of Mathieu Perreault’s Caps’ sweaters for signing, and if I heard correctly, claimed it came from the game in which Matty broke his nose. Of course the young center signed and posed for pictures with the fan.

This hockey landmark, lamentably, is unfit to host high-level hockey in the present. It can’t really host much of anything that might draw a big crowd. The building’s simply not to today’s fire and safety codes. The Bears can practice at HPA, they can devote some days of fall training camp there, but there are no more full-scale athletic events held there. Lebanon Valley College still plays its home games there, however. But every hockey fan I think ought to make at least one pilgrimage up to HPA for a Bears’ skate, or a Sunday afternoon public skating session in fall and winter, and behold the vantages of this mecca’s super steeply pitched seats — every seat in this home for hockey is situated right on top of the action.

Old wood benches are occasionally used by today's Bears' players to dull a bit of a skate's edge judged a bit too sharp

I'm sure most high school locker rooms in central Pennsylvania offer more amenities and comforts than does the home team's in HPA. But when I observed Bears' players lacing up their skates Friday there was nothing but smiles and the usual pre-practice banter enveloping this primitive dressing room.

Practice drills and rituals are no different in HPA than at Giant Center. But the spectator feels time-capsuled back into another era altogether.

Mathieu Perreault was all obliging for a fan who arrived at practice bearing one of his Capitals' sweaters.

After practice Friday Bears' radio voice John Walton gave Ben Raby and me a personalized tour of HPA, including this stop at the oh so primitive broadcast booth used by visiting teams' announcers years ago. Before Walton's work in Hershey, he also called games for the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks of the AHL. "I think we won three of eighteen games here," he told me Friday. To enter and exit this remarkable broadcast pen, announcers literally had to step onto armrests of adjoining seats. "But you had the best view in the AHL here," Walton noted.

Up the road a bit, in Hershey, as ever, there’s plenty of hockey heart. The Bears finished the past weekend with a pair of losses, but all that left them with in 2011 was a record of 14-3-2. They are solidly entrenched in second place in a strong AHL East division, and league observers are increasingly suggesting that the Bears are a team to watch come postseason.

This is a remarkable position for them to be in, in light of the roster ravaging endured by last year’s Calder defending champions. They lost their no. 1 netminder (Michal Neuvirth) and their top defensive pairing (Carlson, Alzner) to the Caps straight out of training camp, and Mathieu Perreault and Jay Beagle for healthy chunks in promotion, as well as key cogs from their championships runs in Alexandre Giroux and Chris Bourque, to greener pastures. They’ve battled big-time injury issues as well this season. But they just keep on winning. They don’t much take nights off. They wear the Bears’ crest with pride, mindful of the extraordinary expectations of the Hershey community. The players who wear the crest change, but the demand of excellence from them is unwavering.

Earlier today the Bears’ bus moved through Washington en route to Norfolk for a Tuesday night engagement with the Admirals. Some Bears were messaging hellos to Washington hockey fans from the bus via Twitter. A few of us here wished they could have stopped to play a game we could watch.

It’s been a hat trick of extraordinary accomplishments for the radio men of Washington-affiliated hockey this season: Earlier this season the Capitals’ Steve Kolbe called his 1,000th game with the Caps, and the Capitals’ original radio voice, Ron Weber, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame as the 2010 Foster Hewitt Memorial Award recipient. JW belongs right with them as an iconic voice bringing our game alive to those not in the arena.

Walton calls for January 27 Bears’ triumph

Additionally, there have been key injuries early on in 2010-11. Patrick McNeill’s season hasn’t gotten started; he’s still recovering from offseason shoulder surgery. Top playmaker and sniper Keith Aucoin went down last month with a knee injury. He’s expected back soon. Steve Pinizzotto missed all three of this past weekend’s games with a finger injury. Francois Bouchard is nursing a neck injury.

It perhaps then should be no surprise: wins are harder to come by for these new-look Bears. At 10-7-0-1 after Sunday night’s 4-3 victory over Hartford they’re lodged in an odd place in the AHL’s East Division — 4th, 7 points behind a white-hot Junior Penguins club (14-3). On Saturday night the Bears lost a toughie to visiting Wilkes-Barre 4-3 despite going 3-for-3 on the power play. On Sunday they faced this league’s proverbial gut-check game — the third of the weekend, again at home. And they did so coming off an emotionally draining setback 20 hours earlier against their bitter in-state foe. It was a bit of beleaguered backdrop: the very beat-up Bears facing the prospect of going pointless over the course of a three-game weekend for the first time since they re-affiliated with Washington in 2005. Seriously. I was stunned when Bears’ radio voice John Walton shared that tidbit with me in the pre-game, and the Patriot News’ Tim Leone verified it with a second-intermission perusal of the team’s media guide.

Imagine, not a single ‘lost’ weekend among the litany played by this organization under the Capitals’ banner these past five years.

Another oddity about Sunday: the Wolfpack were making their final appearance in Hershey. Beginning November 27 the team, under new owner Howard Baldwin, will be known at the Connecticut Whale. The team’s website has already begun the transition. When was the last time you can recall a pro sports franchise changing its entire identity in mid-season?

In somewhat of a surprise assignment a rehabbing Semyon Varlamov started the back-to-back set of Saturday and Sunday games this weekend, as opposed to splitting his duty between Friday and Sunday. Head Coach Mark French explained that having the concluding games at home allowed Varlamov access to team staff who could prepare him well and allow him to be a “creature of comfort” this weekend. The Caps might have liked him to see more work this weekend: he faced just just 23 shots Saturday night followed by 22 on Sunday. Against Hartford the Bears formed an effective box in front of Varly that kept the Wolfpack’s side-to-side puck movement to a minimum; it was therefore difficult to determine just how uniformly comfortable and fit the young netminder’s healing groin is. But in all other respects he looked fit.

Sheldon Souray was a healthy scratch, the Bears’ coaching staff not wanting to put him in a three-in-three set of exertion just returned from the injured list.

There is one player who fairly delights in all this hockey playing on the weekend — Mathieu Perreault. He earned Sunday’s first star for his two-goal performance. Leone the Bears’ beat reporter likes to point out that when it comes to that Sunday grind game players’ spirits are often willing but the legs are not. And fatigue manifests itself in a variety of forms. You notice, for instance, that crisp tape-to-tape passing at the start of a weekend is often replaced by more pucks hitting skates instead of tape come Sunday. Less so, though, with Perreault.

“I like the afternoon games maybe better than the night games,” he said in the Sunday postgame. “The third games are tough, but so far every Sunday game in my career I feel like my legs are great. I’ve been playing my best game on Sundays. When I play a lot of games close I feel like I’m just getting my legs warm [by Sunday].”

The kid just loves to play; the AHL could probably schedule Sunday doubleheaders and Matty would be the first to report for that sixth period of duty.

Perreault broke a scoreless tie just 17 seconds into the second period, magically thieving a Wolfpack clearing pass right at the blueline and going in all alone and besting Hartford netminder Cameron Talbot with a patient slide of the puck underneath Talbot’s pads.

The Bears’ revamped look today includes Perreault centering the top line with Andrew Gordon to his right and Brian Willsie to his left. Big, big numbers for this line, and the playmaking pivot and his right wing had strong fall camps with the Caps. Gordon is now second in the entire league in scoring with 12 goals and 13 assists in 18 games. Willsie is 6th in scoring with 21 points. And Perreault’s 4 goals and 14 assists in just 12 games lodge him just outside the top 20 of league scorers.

Big change on the back end, too. When Souray’s out of the lineup Lawrence Nycholat forms a top pairing with Zach Miskovic. There’s simply no replacing a Carlson-Alzner pairing.

Aucoin’s absence is especially noticeable on the Bears’ power play. Like the Capitals the Bears love the back door setup while a man up, and time and time again on Sunday Hershey’s extra man unit patiently pursued it, in vain. Aucoin has been a force for the team with that play, as both QB and finisher. It will be a different looking Bears’ team with Aucoin, Souray, and McNeill in the lineup, and hopefully all three are fit for duty come spring. The wild card is the potential of having Cody Eakin’s season in Swift Current end in time for the speedy center to join the Bears for a playoff push.

The JW call: Matty strikes early in second

Other dates for catching Walton’s iconic calls: December 3, 10 and 17; January 7, 23, and 28; February 11, 15, and 18. And who knows, we may see 1500 pick up some American League playoff puck as well.

It’s been a terrific autumn for the organization’s radio talent, past and present. The voice of one of the best in the business will now get a long-deserved introduction on local airwaves. Expect more hockey fans to be formed.