The Capitals unveiled their new uniform look early last summer, but it’s this offseason that will fully showcase just how successful the makeover was.
Saturday afternoon I stopped by the Kettler-Capitals’ pro shop to see a buddy there working a weekend shift sharpening skates and moving merchandise, and the movement of goods this spring, he reported, has been brisk.
“It’s been a zoo in here the last few weeks,” he told me.
Fans seemed to appreciate the new look just two or three games into the preseason last September. Until then, they’d seen only photographs of the fashion upgrade in action-less stills. Once vivid, high-def-in-digital game imagery of the new threads was published on line, praise for the makeover was widespread. The team modernized its on-ice look, but not lavishly or outlandishly or, most importantly, faddishly, and there were clear but subtle acknowledgements back to the original threads. It was a look that appeared to be the best of the old blended with a hip new.
More fans wearing more of the new color and look became apparent at Verizon Center after the end-of-the-year holidays in 2007, and as the team turned its season around by late winter in 2008, even more of the red, white and blue filled the home rink. The new look was fast becoming a smash hit.
When the stretch-run became white-red-hot, so too did the look of the nation’s capital. The team declared “Red Outs” for the final week of regular season play, and the fans responded fanatically. The uni-color solidarity within the Phone Booth continued into the postseason. Comcast’s Lisa Hillary told me during one home postseason game that Verizon Center looked distinctly like Calgary’s Red Mile of playoffs past.
Planned or unplanned, the team’s return to its original colors has afforded an opportunity to market the old with the new. On my visit to the Kettler shop Saturday I saw rack after rack of red, but the names and numbers on the t-shirts were both old and new. Semin, Clark, and Ovechkin were joined by Hunter and Langway. My father, who wore his red senior’s hockey sweater to two postseason home games, will later this week be receiving an old-school, old-logo-ed red t-shirt bearing Rod Langway’s nameplate and number on its back, along with instructions to wear it both while mowing his massive yard and barbequing for Saturday night houseguests. He loved Langway.
I have plans for some heavy-duty recreating this summer. I’ll be sweating a lot in red.
Saturday was gorgeous in D.C., and the moreso to be navigating the route back from Kettler-Capitals toward Maryland on the GW Parkway. The first Saturday of being eliminated from hockey’s postseason is always a painful one for me, but under that Chamber of Commerce sky Saturday, with my sack of red as companion, I felt immense pride instead of pain, and I began thinking about Washington’s hockey hardcore as well as the new converts this spring showcasing their pride in the hockey team this offseason. There is so much to be proud of.
Our Army should be arriving at neighborhood pools this offseason covered up in red. Yard work should be conducted in a ‘Rock the Red’ tee. Jogging, rollerblading, dog walking — all of it should be completed while identified as Ovie, Olie, Huntsy, or Langway. We should attend rock concerts at Nissan and Merriweather and Rock the Red there as well.
Let’s Red-out the region this summer. The Washington Post is watching.
Ready the DVRs (does anyone use a VCR anymore?) for Comcast SportsNet at 5pm on Thursday. ‘Washington Post Live’ is leaving the studio for a day and taking the whole show to the concourse of Verizon Center for a full slate of Caps’ talk.
My good friend 
Most especially in Canada, “hockey is absolutely central and integral to lives of boys and their dads, and much of what happens between them begins to unfold the very first time a young father leads his little one out onto the ice,” we learn in Roy MacGregor’s The Home Team: Fathers, Sons & Hockey. “Hockey is the vehicle through that complex relationship, and it is also the expression of that relationship.”
