The Post’s Metro section on Thursday also brought more fun for the region’s hockey fans — word of one local family’s longstanding allegiance to the Burgundy and Gold shifting dramatically to the Red of Chinatown.

Columnist Robert McCartney’s account of the Bethesda, Md., Krogh family is must-read material for Capitals’ supporters, especially the local and long suffering who’ve endured decades of Redskin overkill here.

The Kroghs, McCartney reports, have had Redskins’ season tickets for more than 40 years, but starting next season they’re abandoning the Danny and embracing Ted’s troops. Especially telling about the respective reversal of fortunes for the two teams, according to the Krogh family: if they have extra Capitals tickets they have no problem recruiting takers for them, but they can’t give away their Skins’ seats. “While I can’t seem to get clients to go with me to a Redskins game, I can get them to go to a Caps game, no problem,” a Krogh told McCartney.

Then the family cites a litany of good reasons for the increasingly widespread Deadskins’ dissatisfaction — the need to devote the entirety of Sundays getting to, enduring, and returning from the games, feeling ripped off at every concession inside the stadium, and being surrounded by “falling down drunks” each Sunday. Well who wouldn’t want to endure such conditions, and at the cost of a moderate mortgage?

McCartney wonders how many other longtime Skins’ ticket holders have made such a dramatic switch of allegiance. It’s an intriguing question.

“By traditional standards, for a longtime Washington area family like the Kroghs, this is heresy. Sacrilege. An abomination,” McCartney writes.

It’s also a sign of the times.

illustration by Brooke Hatfield

Leadership at the Washington City Paper has unveiled a legal defense fund for its hero-journalist Dave McKenna. McKenna, you almost certainly know by now, crafted a sumptuous survey of Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder’s malfeasance and bullying tactics over the past 12 years. This defense fund, City Paper editors note, is part symbolism, part practical solicitation. “This is about showing Snyder you support our right—and anyone’s right—to write the truth about him, or any powerful public figure, even if it’s not flattering,” editors there wrote earlier today.

Dan Snyder is stupidly lawyering up in this matter (loved his “the lawyers are making me” do this rationale during his embarrassing media tour of yesterday), so the alternative Paper of modest means must have the means to defend itself.

(If you haven’t yet seen the eviscerating commentary from WUSA-TV sportscaster Brett Haber on this matter, you should.)

Every member of the OFB team will be contributing to the fund. If you’ve left a sympathetic or supportive comment here or elsewhere for McKenna — for free speech — please try and make at least a modest symbolic donation to the fund. Donations via Paypal can be addressed to legaldefense@washingtoncitypaper.com.

When victory against Snyder in this matter is secured — and it will be — we’ll throw a big party at some bar downtown. We can all wear little devil’s horns atop our heads to it.

The Redskins’ owner feels defamed and unfairly maligned; at last he can empathize with his fanbase.

All you need to know about the merits of Snyder’s suit — and of his true motivation in bringing it — can be divined from this passage his lawyers wrote recently in a letter to the City Paper’s ownership: “Mr. Snyder has more than sufficient means to protect his reputation . . . We presume that defending such litigation would not be a rational strategy for an investment fund such as yours. Indeed, the cost of litigation would presumably quickly outstrip the asset value of the Washington City Paper.”

Once a bully, always a bully.

I hadn’t read a word of McKenna’s journalism prior to yesterday. McKenna has been with City Paper since 1986, so he’s no johnny-come-lately in town looking to make a name for himself. Instead, he got well-established investigative bona fides and brings them beautifully to bear against Washington’s most inviting target: the Danny. Would that Washington’s largest newspaper had the cajones of City Paper in this regard. But that’s partly why alternative media is so valued today.

In his must-read piece — which is receiving a lot more readings because Snyder has zero public relations instincts — McKenna presents an A-to-Z dictionary of dastardly deeds done by the Danny, which if only half were true would justify lowering the owner into a viper pit. My favorite entry in the McKenna A-to-Z  compendium:

“Vanilla: Flavor of ice cream that Snyder left to thaw in defensive coordinator Mike Nolan’s office TWICE in one season to let the coach know the owner felt his schemes were simplistic, or vanilla. John Feinstein wrote that Snyder’s second delivery, after a loss to Dallas, consisted of “three giant canisters of melting 31 Flavors ice cream” and a note that said “I do not like vanilla.”‘

(It’s impossible to imagine Ted Leonsis stooping to such histrionics; besides, what chance would there be of ice cream surviving long enough to thaw in Coach Boudreau’s office?)

When I encountered McKenna’s work yesterday there were literally hundreds of passionately supportive reader comments for it. Today when you follow the link to it you encounter this message at the bottom of the page: “Due to very high traffic on February 2nd, comments are being cached on a separate page.”

There’s a cornucopia of incredible crimes chronicled in McKenna’s civic gift to D.C. — Snyder even allowed peanuts older than Sonny Jurgensen, procured from a defunct airline, to be sold to Redskins’ fans at his stadium. You can’t make this stuff up.

Most damning from my vantage — and trust me, it’s not easy to select a worst of the worst with this creep — is his insistence that local media tasked with covering his team purchase the right to cover them. Synder referred to these ethics-deficient reporters as “media partners.” George Michael we know wrote the check. So did many of those who struck you as sycophants of the Skins on TV all these years, City Paper points out, except for those from one outlet — WJLA TV, whose personalities was forced to file remotes from the Redskins’ parking lot at the team’s practice facility.

Checkbook journalism, proudly brought to unprecedented heights in sports by Dan Snyder’s Washington Redskins.

I don’t blame Snyder for the ethics of Washington’s big-name media personalities — they’re corrupt in their own right. But like so many other things about his management style, it’s profit first, second and last with this guy, unsightly and unscrupulous business practices be damned. Like suing an impoverished grandmother.

And it bears mentioning: not all local journalists come off looking corrupt by virtue of their proximity to Snyder. One of my favorite members of the local media, our guy down by the glass, Al Koken, deserves huge props for coining the term ‘Dan-Jazeera‘ in characterizing Snyder’s media relations sensibilities.

As sad as this story is there is some good news: the hue and cry from this latest bit of bullying from Snyder is occasioning no small viral backlash. John Feinstein, who famously called for a boycott of Snyder back in 2008, penned a poignant rejoinder this morning:

This isn’t a nuisance suit it’s a bully suit. It is Danny Snyder trying to bully a small paper into firing someone. It is disgusting and it is proof—again—of who Dan Snyder really is. It is also proof that the people around him (again) are dumb or have absolutely no power to talk him out of doing things that are not only beyond mean-spirited but are flat out stupid.

“Snyder is even playing the Jew card on this one. He and minions found a Rabbi at The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles who was willing to call the cartoon anti-semitic. Oh please. A newspaper ran a cartoon depicting Mike Krzyzewski as the devil during last year’s Final Four. Was it in poor taste? Sure. But was it anti-Polish? Of course not. No one is anti-semitic here. They are anti-Dan Snyder. Period.

“A friend of mine, David Sanders—a lifelong Redskins fan—said to me yesterday that he believes the Redskins are 20 years into a 60-year drought. Snyder is only responsible for the last 12 but David’s point is clear: Snyder is 46-years-old and he’s not going to sell this team unless the fans in this town somehow marshal their forces and simply STOP going to games and STOP buying Redskins-gear and scream at the top of their lungs that they’re sick and tired of this little bully and they aren’t going to take it anymore.”

The latter observation is, if you’ll pardon my word choice, the money moment in all this. The Redskins are metaphysically inoculated from success so long as Synder is involved in their operations. How much more of his terror-error reign needs to be endured? And I’d add: he plays no small role in Washington’s sports fans’ new-found passion for seeing the Capitals succeed, if for no other reason than to distract them from the Titantic mess Snyder has made of a once flagship professional sports franchise, one that for generations served as a deep and broad focal point for Washington civic pride.

Dave McKenna may well need a legal defense fund in this matter, and if he does, I’d hope to be the first contributor to it. Meanwhile, Washington babies should be named after him (Dave for the boys, McKenna for the girls).

Hopefully cooler legal heads will prevail, and this nuisance lawsuit will be dropped. Just as importantly, hopefully more in media will be inspired by Dave McKenna’s principled and dogged coverage, and at long last stand up against our city’s biggest, ruinous bully.

Games like Monday’s against Toronto lend credence to the view that the Capitals to some degree are struggling this regular season with finding an urgency of the moment. And the NHL regular season is set up to do just that. The moreso in the Southeast. I’ve pondered the possibility of this December 23, the Capitals’ opening salvo versus the Pens — a matchup that could pit nos. 1 versus 2 in the entire league — bringing a bit of renewed focus to our team. In essence, it could serve as a de facto Opening Night in a quest for meaningful hockey. HBO cameras are newly positioned to add significance to the Capitals’ pre-2011 labor.

Part of the problem is that there is no conceivable scenario by which the Caps fail to qualify for the postseason. Two teams from the Southeast look like likely postseason participants; the Caps of course will be one of them. There is the possibility, too, that the Tampa Bay Lightning could give the Caps a bit of a push for a Southeast title banner, but those have accumulated with regularity of late; like the President’s Trophy, I’m not sure what driving value another regular season feat has for this club.

So perhaps we look to the arrival of the Pens on the calendar as a launching pad for motivated hockey.

But there might be another cause for the Caps to get up a bit for the regular season grind: their standing in the local sports scene. To put it bluntly: they’re the only watchable pro game in town. Again. Every autumn in Daniel Snyder’s Reign of Terror there is a meltdown moment, when even the most loyal of the faithful recoil in anguish and disgust, and last Sunday in the Meadowlands produced that. L’Affair Haynesworth this week served up stale fruitcake as additional holiday offering for locals by the club. The Wizards we’ll take more seriously when they’re renamed and rebuilt. The Nats need their ace out of a sling, and Bryce Harper a regular in the lineup. It short, it isn’t pretty anywhere else you look.

The upset carried off by Montreal last spring did more, I think, than train-wreck a best-ever regular season for the icers — it halted a novel ascendancy for hockey here. Our city was so poised to fall so madly in love with a championship contender. The Caps deep in 2010, it seems to me, are being afforded a bit of a recount for Homecoming King.

The infrastructure for a special love affair is in place — you see it on every home game night, as mass transit reddens, Chinatown eateries become clogged with puck disciples, the sidewalks become overtaken with the Red Army. There was something intangible as a cultural moment about this past Sunday’s skate in the park by Capitals’ players and hundreds of fans that seemed to illustrate powerfully the team’s ascendancy here. It isn’t quite that other pro athletes here must hide in public from D.C. sports fans; it’s just that we don’t quite smile at their appearances the way we do for our Young Guns. It has been a startling sports culture transformation. Capitals players and management deserve an awful lot of credit for this achievement.

But it’s not enough.

How could you not fall hard for this kid?

Capitals’ players, by virtue of their youth and an interconnectedness with other athletes here, are like many of us fans of the Skins and Wiz and Nats. And they know the score(s). On some subconscious level at least they must also know the novel niche they presently fill. There’s so much more to be done with that.

Because they win and do so in highly entertaining fashion the Capitals have sold out their rink and occasioned a cultural transformation in the District. Hockey’s hip here. That’s swell; unfathomable 10 years ago, but irrefutable today. But there can be so much more. An inspired Capitals’ club could leave a seriously heavy footprint on Washington’s winter sports culture. Beginning immediately the Capitals ought to make it their mission to skate every game with both swagger and killer instinct. They cannot win every game, of course, but they do control their own destiny as it relates to passion and effort and drive. There should not be another single blown third period lead to an inferior club. Not one.

Don’t just win a lot — win with a character that bespeaks springtime success. This will convert even more masses.

Little Matty Perreault is a public relations godsend. He needs to live up to his end of the bargain, but if he does, lavish his game of playmaking wizardry and girl-swooning good looks on the local masses. He especially is a compelling photo-op at local elementary schools, perhaps leading floor hockey stick-handling clinics among schoolchildren not much smaller than he. Send him to the schools on off days with D.J. King or Jason Chimera, and allow the curious and uninitiated to see hockey’s marvelous diversity of physique.

This HBO involvement is serious business, too. It is highly likely that the 2011 Winter Classic, now just three weeks away, will emerge as the most hyped and talked about regular season hockey game in the history of professional hockey in North America. Maybe the most talked about and covered hockey game ever. HBO’s involvement in this story will do more for broadening hockey’s appeal — here and nationally — than anything NBC can fathom, for the imprimatur HBO sports documentaries offer contemporary sports is iconic. The Capitals can, beginning immediately, rise to this special moment and make sure that what the documentary cameras capture is special.

If they do so, Washington sports fans will remember, and respond.

There seemed no sense in piling on any more. But Monday’s Night’s Massacre has occasioned what strikes us as an unprecedented and uniquely personal volume and level of media pillorying for Dan Snyder, and perhaps at long last provided the basis for questioning the Skins’ seemingly eternal place at the top of the local sports pecking order. Really, will local pro football fans trudge out to that godforsaken mausoleum in PG County like sheep, bilked out of hundreds of dollars on every visit, forever? This week, it would seem not: a cornerstone of the high-pitched reaction to the debacle that is the Redskins is media acknowledgment that (1) the team has been lying about selling out football games here and (2) many, many Redskins’ ticket holders have no stomach for the experience, and in rote fashion sell their seats, resulting in the conspicuously unfriendly atmosphere that is the invasion of the enemy fan. And there’s no remedy in sight.

Our pucksandbooks has taken the position here that there is no divine right to top-of-the-heap stature for the Skins or any other team; which is to say, the Skins weren’t always the no. 1 game in town, and they can, under the right circumstances, fall back again. Admittedly, it’s difficult to fathom, but then again, who might have imagined a non-dynastic football coming in here and hanging 60 on our team before a national television audience? In the rain. Moreover, what if a given market has, as alternative to Attila the Hun — the litigator against grandmothers — as owner, one like Mr. Leonsis? That contrasting dynamic is just beginning to forge, as Leonsis’ Monumental Sports empire is in its infancy. The argument here, then, isn’t that hockey will trump football in popularity in these parts so much as it is that hockey could offer an oasis of fun and competent management and civic pride that ushers in a healthy reorientation — most especially by local sports media. Washington, at least in the manifestation of nostalgia, will always have a revering spot in its sporting heart for the Skins (as it should). But thanks uniquely and ironically to Dan Snyder, Washington may at last become a relatively balanced sports town, with local media belatedly acknowledging the right way of doing things.

This sickening and sorry state of affairs truly is nothing for local hockey fans to celebrate — not if you consider yourself a Washingtonian first and a sports fan second. We at OFB desperately want our home to be a great sports town, and believe it can and should be. It just can’t so long as Dan Snyder owns the Skins and local media en masse gives him a pass on his harrowing path of destruction.

It is against this backdrop that we’d have you stop whatever you’re doing and, assuming you haven’t already heard it, listen to the righteous rant of 106.7 the Fan’s Chad Dukes from yesterday afternoon. And if you’ve heard it once, listen to it again. Most in Washington’s sports media still need to grow a pair when it comes to covering the Skins, but not Dukes. We are especially drawn to his principled criticism because it resembles our own: local boy, devoted Skins’ fan, beaten down by the Danny. Don’t focus on the tone and shriek to the screed; instead, absorb the substantive content of Dukes’ diatribe, almost all of which is directed at Dan Snyder:

• ‘You capitalize, every single year, off the sweat and the blood of the people that built this franchise.’

• Speaking of devoted Redskins fans, Chad chimes in ‘We are not whores, and you are not pimps.’

• Again at Snyder: ‘You don’t know what you’re doing . . . you bilk us out of our money . . . You sign every old-ass player . . . You kill me . . . You make me sick . . . charging 30 bucks [sic; it's actually $35] to park a mile away.’

• ‘Get the hell away from my football team.’

• ‘I want Redskins’ reparations.’

Click here to hear the Chad Dukes rant on the Redskins 59-28 loss