By queer, delightful coincidence I decided at the last minute to don my Dale Hunter Quebec Nordiques sweater for my Sunday visit to Bugsy’s. I needed to remind the out-of-town friends I was meeting there that Bugsy’s was a hockey bar, even while every TV screen was broadcasting NFL football that day. I had a heavy flannel shirt on over my sweater, and the two hockey coaches were the first folks I saw in the bar as I walked in. I walked right up to the table where they were seated sipping cold ones and unveiled my allegiance.

“Now that’s old school!” the head coach said, smiling at his assistant.

I regaled the coaches with warm welcomes and then left them to their off-day relaxation. My friends, apprised of my stunning good fortune, implored me to return to the coaches’ table and request a photo, and for the legend to sign my sweater, and I confess, I gave it a brief moment’s consideration. But I’ve been imbued by a modicum of media professionalism working with the Capitals’ media relations team in recent years, and more importantly, I’m a big believer that our sports heroes need come space out in public to be just like us, free from memorabilia pleadings and such. For me on Sunday it was more than enough thrill to shake the legend’s hand and say, “Welcome home.”

If you’ve been to Bugsy’s just once you know that owner Bryan Watson has made it a shrine of sorts to our sport. My football-loving friends on Sunday were stunned by the framed photos of brutally beaten up ice warriors that gloriously clutter Bugsy’s walls. I’d forgotten, but Dale Hunter’s home white Capitals sweater is encased and hung prominently in the bar. Sunday I really enjoyed looking at that historic sweater and seeing the legend who wore it relaxing some 20 feet away. It was for me one of the more powerful proof points of our arrival as a hockey town. A hockey town needs a hockey legend, of course, and better if he’s actually in town and once in a while out and about so that soldiers can stop by his table and salute him.

I’ve been around Alexander Ovechkin, one of the greatest hockey players in the world, a great deal the past five years, literally hundreds of up close encounters in Capitals’ locker rooms. I’ve interviewed Sidney Crosby in the visitor’s locker room at Verizon Center. I’ve chatted up Bryan Murray and Peter Bondra and famous New York Times reporters while being credentialed to cover the Caps. None of those experiences delivered anything approaching the exhilaration I experienced with my proximity to Coach Hunter on Sunday. It seems silly, and then it doesn’t.

For the first time since I started blogging with credentials I felt awestruck Sunday, but in a good and healthy way. I was quasi-trembling for nearly three hours seated almost immediately next to the new coach. I knew that no other coach, no other figure from the Capitals’ past, could make me feel that way. Distracted as I was, I had difficulty listening to my friends’ conversation with any fidelity. Obviously I didn’t give a damn about the football overhead.

There’s just something about this moment, and that set of silver hair, and those steely blue eyes conveying still a warrior’s intensity, even in Sunday relaxation; just something almost notoriously novel in his being here, right now, taking charge of these Washington Capitals. I know that George McPhee believes it, but my belief is rooted largely in devotional faith, not any objective, dispassionate analysis. And I’m not apologizing for it.

On Sunday I liked a lot that over the course of about three hours the coach, seated with his assistant and later joined by Bugsy himself, never once glanced up at all the football on all the TV screens. The hockey men were there to toss back a few cold ones and . . . talk hockey. On their day off.

Understandably, at so critical a moment for the Capitals, we all want hard and fast evidence that this momentous change will deliver the goods, that this particular change is paramount among final tinkering by George McPhee with his grand design. It is our fervent hope. But of course we can’t know, not before next spring. Instead, we’re supposed to relish all the drama fraught with the unknown journey. For this hockey fan, Dale Hunter’s return home, to lead, is an unmistakable signal that our hockey culture is changing, already, and this Christmas that’s good enough for me.

The Governors’ vote was a landslide 26-4. We don’t quite know who the dissenters were (we have educated guesses), but we’re confident our guy wasn’t among them. To Ted Leonsis (and Dick Patrick), the OFB team says, from the bottom of our collective hockey heart, Thank you! With your vote you helped make Washington a better hockey town.

We are keenly aware that so small number of hockey fans in this region have no attachment to the Capitals’ Patrick affiliation of the past. And yet many of those same fans have stepped into Verizon Center on the nights of visits from the Flyers and Penguins and Rangers and felt, acutely, the different atmosphere. Ready yourselves for an entire season of it. And God willing, another generation of one of the fiercest rivalry atmospheres in all of professional sports. Our blogging team reflects individually on the moment:

Tuesday Puck Daddy identified the Caps as "winners" in the NHL's "radical realignment"

Empty Maybe: I suppose it’s odd to be so excited to see more of something you really don’t like — in this case, however, it seems perfectly natural.

I do not like the following teams: the Flyers, the Penguins, the Rangers, the Devils and the Islanders. And I’m going to be seeing a lot more of them. And not just in the regular season but in the playoffs, where true hockey hatred is forged and purified.

I get tense during the playoffs because I’m a Caps fan, and as such I know there are no sure things, no ‘easy’ match-ups. During a series against the Penguins or Flyers, however, I become positively mental. Blood-pressure raising-type mental. “Buy flowers and make reservations for a nice apologetic dinner pre-emptively” type mental.

And now I’m going to get that worked up more often.

I’m glad that the plan includes a home-and-home with every team in the league, and I’m surprised that such a radical re-shifting happened so quickly, but most of all I’m bracing myself for the playoffs. Gleefully.

Gary: I could not be more excited about the announced realignment. It’s a welcomed homecoming. More recent Caps fans probably don’t think twice about the New York Islanders. Yes they’ve been horrible for a number of years now — in no small part to ‘Genius’ Milbury — but I still hate them. Why? The playoffs in the ’80s. Similar feelings for the Penguins. Why?  Playoffs.

This realignment brings us back to our close neighbors. Short and frequent trips to the hated lands in Pennsylvania and New York.  Playoff triumphs and failures intensify with repetition with divisional playoffs. Those intense feelings carry over to regular season games.  One never really felt that with games against Atlanta or Florida.

Now the NHL needs to complete this realignment properly with the four conference names. They already know how to spell them and where they should be.

Patrick. Adams. Norris. Smythe.

Elisabeth Meinecke: One of the themes which emerged at last Thursday’s Caps-Pens battle from journalists both paid and unpaid to watch hockey games was that more games should be like the one developing below us that night: two teams that had a solid history of disliking each other elevating their level of play. Ken Dryden once said that by the time you retire, you are grateful for a good opponent, because they have only forced you to play your best. With the Caps’ new conference opponents, they’re going to be playing their best a lot more frequently.

DC SportsChick: Admittedly, I’ve only been a fan since the Southeast Division alignment, but this is a great development. It’s really hard to get excited about games with Tampa. Now, playing New York or Philly is a different story. Those are great cities to visit for an away game, and the rivalry is intense. That’s something you don’t see with Florida or Winnipeg. The realignment bring much-needed enthusiasm and excitement to the NHL.

Mike Rucki: Getting an extra home game each season against Philly, Pittsburgh, New Jersey, and the New York Rangers is a boon to both fans and owners alike. More intensity in the arena, more fans in the seats, more Ted-pleasing sold-out games. It also makes sense to keep Carolina in the division while jettisoning the Florida teams; the ‘Canes and Caps have developed a healthy dislike for each other over the years.

But perhaps most exciting is that the Capitals will have a better chance to judge their postseason chances during the regular season. With more intense play during the year, the Caps will no longer be able to finesse themselves to a division title. Now the Caps will have to succeed against bitter, physical rivals all season, and therefore should be better prepared for the inevitable postseason shift toward bruising, grind-it-out confrontations. It may be a somewhat painful transition at first, but it will improve the Capitals’ chances for playoff success by forcing the team to build the right roster — and the right attitude — to flourish in May and June.

pucksandbooks: I’m not sure I can identify a moment of greater pride being affiliated with this blog. At our inception we planted the flag of Patrick Division Reunification in the e-ground. We listened attentively to all dissent (“Atlanta’s a Top 10 market — the Thrash aren’t going anywhere!”), but ours was a position of principle and passion. So maybe this moment ought to be instructive: if you love a sport dearly, and believe rigorous reform imperative for its overall health, champion it — spiritedly, with unwavering resolve. The fight for reform may take years, but when it arrives, it’s oh so sweet — and the sweeter for the duration of the battle waged.

It’s seldom trumpeted, but hatred is part of the plasma of our sport, and the Washington Capitals have known no hatred quite like that which boiled over in the Patrick division years. And now it’s back. Seemingly miraculously!

I can’t help but think that the genesis for this amazing moment might just date back to New Years weekend, in Pittsburgh, when the Red Army made so spirited a showing at Heinz Field. Capitals’ officials forecasted 20,000 in Red marking the pilgrimage; instead, the figure was closer to 30,000, and the Army, with all of hockey watching, made the national anthem theirs and were never silenced thereafter. How could anyone have left that stadium and that atmosphere and not wondered: what if these two teams, with their iconic stars, could battle again for division titles, and in divisional playoffs?

It’s true: Chinatown today is transformed on hockey nights. It is ablaze in Red. As a Washington native I walk among the throng and have yet to grow accustomed to the spectacle, even years later. But it’s about to be transformed again. What lies ahead with Patrick Division 2.0 is the formation of elite hockey culture in a fledgling hockey town. Redskins, beware.

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.

Turns out, as a sports town we’re somewhere in the middle — not real good, certainly not awful. Steinberg offers a bit of a comparative continuum which posits cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo as distinctly passionate about their teams — the very civic identity of those towns is directly related to the teams, Steinberg suggests — versus a set of sports apathetic outposts found in Atlanta, Tampa, and Miami. We’re somewhere in between on that continuum. Sounds about right to me.

Of course, I’ve been one who’s long suggested that big media in these parts have played a lead role in limiting — undermining, actually — the perception of Washington as a sport town. Tourists and business visitors to our city are fairly forced into the perception that D.C. only cares about one team each morning they pick up the big paper or tune in to the local television sportscasts. To some extent — especially with respect to NHL hockey — this self-fulfilling myopia bred a countering, insurgent new media alternative.

If there’s a shortcoming to Steinz’s piece I’d point to its deference to a longstanding (cliched, really) scapegoat for our perceived inadequacy: that the cultural foundation of D.C. is the federal bureaucracy, bringing with it, among other traits, unavoidable transiency. For one thing, D.C. has become a high-tech haven over the past 20 years, delivering high-income, durable, roots-planting occupations, which in turn has helped drive dramatic development across the region. Concurrently, there has been exponential growth in federal contracting, and contracting careers, and the only thing that outlives death is a federal contract. But I’m not sure it matters any more whether you’re in D.C. four years with an administration or 40 with a lobby shop. The ubiquity of digital media, the voracious information consumption via hand-helds — and Washington is as wired as any city in the world — renders occupational consideration in this discussion, I think, moot. And doesn’t it say something that we now have two around-the-clock sportstalk radio stations operating here?

I think there are very specific features unique to D.C. that damn us as a sports town, separate and distinct from a one-trick-pony media. Up at the very top — and Steinberg certainly captures this, if in somewhat muted tones — is the conspicuous absence of winning. And not just winning, but winning as a well-managed sports entity. The Pittsburgh Steelers don’t win the Super Bowl every year, but isn’t it commonly accepted that they’re an especially well-run outfit, competitive every year? And further, that the Redskins are not much run like the Steelers are? Interestingly, Steinz amplified this sentiment in Tuesday’s Post, in responding to readers on line. “[A]t some point, I think ownership needs to accept some responsibility for repeated failings over years and years,” he wrote. “And I mean more about the Abe Pollin-led Wizards than the Daniel Snyder-led Redskins, although both would qualify.”

Snyder. To me — and I speak as one who in his Washington youth slept in Redskins pajamas, and toted a Redskins lunchpail to school — Snyder is a plague. We are rightly mocked by the fans of other NFL teams for giving him safe harbor here. I wish I had a dime for every instance I heard a Washington sports fan email me or address me at the rink with ‘If only Ted [Leonsis] owned the Redskins.’  There are two constants to Snyder’s reign of error-terror: His team will lose, and somewhere along the way he’ll freshly speak or act in a manner that gravely offends the sensibilities of our civilized community. Like suing a financially strapped grandmother or creative, civic-minded journalists.

The hope — the expectation — is that now that the pro basketball team is owned by Leonsis better days are ahead. (Of course, they actually have to play for that to happen.) But Ted inherited a spectacularly dysfunctional, decades-long-in-decay entity with the Wiz. That was Abe Pollin’s doing, and Steinz is right to remind Washingtonians of it.

Washington, too, has a physical infrastructure problem with its sports teams, in my opinion. Verizon Center is fine (spectacularly located, turns out). But FedEx Field might be the most reviled big stadium in the entire country. It is a monument mostly to the ineptness of D.C. government, in forcing the Redskins to flee the District to find a much-needed new home. It takes forever to get out to, forever to return from, and while you’re there you’re fairly pilfered out of your retirement savings in attempting to feed your family or wet your whistle.

I’ll raise some eyebrows and provoke some rebuke with my thoughts on Nationals Park, but I maintain that the Nats, in going cheap and with a cookie cutter design, have cultivated, durably, below average attendance on nights when the ace isn’t pitching. It’s not so much that Nationals Park is bad — it isn’t; it’s that to me it suffers comparatively by virtue of its proximity to one of the finest baseball stadiums in all the world, Camden Yards. Put it this way: If I’ve a chum in from out of town who’s a real seamhead, and both the Nats and O’s are home and I’m seeking to deliver to my buddy the more memorable stadium experience, I’m taking him up to Charm City. Note that Camden Yards opened in 1992 and took all of one year to secure Major League Baseball’s All Star game. I’m sure the Nats will get that game one day; it’s just that there’s little clamor from seamheads around the country to fly in and take in a game in our new baseball stadium. For good reason. Again, it’s not a dump. It just suffers as alternative to a classic design up the Beltway. I’m really surprised the Nats didn’t give that greater consideration on the drawing board.

Anyway, we have a bunch of pro teams, but only two of them compete in a stylish home. And we really only have one owner in town who stands as exemplary with respect to earning fans respect and placing proper management in place. In sports, as with so many other things in life, you reap what you sew.

Take note that you can visit the Post here and leave comment related to how D.C. could become a better hockey town. I think a little more springtime winning would take care of that just fine.

So in Washington this morning we’d sort of like to ask the commissioner: Can we start the NHL playoffs this week?

We are witnessing history each night with each successive Capitals’ victory this October, but more importantly, we are witnessing the successful auditioning of a roster for a durable and successful stay in next spring’s postseason — health permitting. And this isn’t merely because the Capitals are winning every time they lace ‘em up, it’s because of how they are winning.

A club that once upon a time failed because of its preference for perimeter play is today hard-charging the opposition cage, making life miserable there for netminders, and scoring goals in bunches from in tight. You pretty much figured that Troy Brouwer and Mike Knuble and Joel Ward would lunch-pale it in the slot, but this fall so too is Alexander Ovechkin. And Marcus Johansson. And . . . Mathieu Perreault.

When we watch this fall’s Capitals win so well and in such a laudable fashion — heavy on cohesion and work ethic — we meditate a bit on the important traits lacking in the failed clubs of the recent past, and increasingly we are led to conclude: those shortcomings sure appear to have been vanquished. Marcus Johansson has seized the long-vacant second-line center slot, displaying blazing speed, deft finish, and a high degree of overall hockey intelligence. You need your second pivot to deliver production and be a bit of a threat. It’s early still, but the toolbox young Johansson is displaying plausibly suggests 25-goal, 50-point production.

Previous Capitals clubs lacked a reliable no. 1 D pairing with battle-tested experience and pedigree. This Capitals club likely has two of them today. If you’ve followed Comcast’s Alan May on either television or Twitter this month you know that one of Washington’s most astute hockey analysts regards this year’s Mike Green as authentically Norris viable, and not because of his big offensive numbers by themselves. Roman Hamrlik is filling precisely the role the Caps had hoped he would, and proving to be the long-sought-for perfect partner for Green. Dennis Wideman is enjoying the finest start of his NHL career, and he might be the Capitals best all around rearguard. He skates in the team’s third pairing.

Take a look at the balanced minutes nightly being skated by the Capitals’ six rearguards: Green (22:45), Hamrlik (21:21), Carlson (19:47), Alzner (18:28), Wideman (20:06), Schultz (17:29).

And speaking of well-managed minutes, the team captain is clocking in at an average of 18:45 a night; he’s never averaged less than 21 minutes a game in his preceding six NHL seasons. If Bruce Boudreau is able to maintain a moderation of labor among his elite talent all season long the Capitals are likely to enter the postseason next spring with the league’s freshest set of legs.

The power play was moribund much of last season, and futile in the postseason. (Again.) As of last night, it ranked no. 1 in the NHL at 29 percent. Last season I was one among many in media who questioned the wisdom of positioning Alexander Ovechkin on the power play point. This season he’s most often found along the half boards with the extra man units — or in front of the net! — while a bevy of capable blueliners crisply distribute the puck and blast low and hard slappers on goal from the point. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.

Capitals playoff clubs in recent years have had quality netminding but something far short of a game-stealer. If Tomas Vokoun’s early work this fall is any indication of what we can expect come spring, the Capitals will be a tough out against any club. Vokoun’s numbers — especially ones subsequent to his debut — are stellar (all told, a 1.80 goals-against, .944 save pct.), but what has drawn my notice most is the technical brilliance with which he plays the position. It doesn’t seem to matter where shots come from on the ice; he seems to have his body consistently squared to the shooter. Pucks hit him in the middle of his frame and pads, rebounds are thereby relatively easily controlled, his blueliners puck possession and breakouts subsequently efficient. And it is certain that Vokoun and his blueliners will become even more comfortable with one another, and of more common understanding with one another, in the months ahead. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.

On the morning of the season opener I overheard general manager George McPhee offer something close to a prediction that his third line of Joel Ward, Brooks Laich, and Jason Chimera would remind folks of one of the team’s all-time best two-way lines: Ulf Dahlen, Jeff Halpern, and Steve Konowalchuk. Prescient forecast, that. No club in the NHL can match the production and two-way impact of the Capitals’ third and fourth lines. It’s rare to see a club skate in fall 12 forwards you hope remain paired without alteration the following spring, but that’s what the Caps appear to have this fall.

This is a terrific time for Washington’s hockey team to be seriously surging, what with the Redskins swooning anew and the Wizards AWOL. Things could get real ice-interesting-re-orienting around here in short order. That would be a beautiful thing to watch.