WASHINGTON — On May 17, the night of Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Final, there were only scant indications around the District of Columbia that a huge hockey game was being played there that night. One was that the Metro was open later than usual, thanks to a jolt of funding from the government of Qatar. Another was that by 5 p.m., those Metro’s trains near the center of the city had a smattering of red jerseys on them.
How the Capitals’ Stanley Cup run is breaking new ground in Washington, D.C.
D.C. has an unusual relationship with its teams, but the Capitals’ breakthrough spring still means a lot.
Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images
In Washington, sports teams blend into the city. They don’t take it over. That’s not a commentary on D.C. sports fans, who are as passionate as anyone about their teams. It’s just that so many of the people in the District (like me) aren’t actually from here. The Capitals have more fans living in surrounding Maryland and Northern Virginia than right in the city, anyway. Capital One Arena is in a bustling part of the city, Chinatown, and is built like a metaphor: The place is almost designed to hide in plain sight, with built-in restaurants and gyms and movie theaters that make the arena look like a mall from the street.
On the sidewalk just a few steps from the turnstiles to go inside was a mix of Capitals fans and all the other kinds of people you see in D.C. In one spot, outside an attached bar called the Greene Turtle, the loudest noise wasn’t boisterous hockey fans but a guy yelling into a megaphone and holding a “JESUS SAID YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN” sign. After a while, some of the people wearing Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom shirts drowned him out.
But something is different in D.C. this spring.
It has to be, or the Capitals wouldn’t be getting ready to play the Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup Final. The Caps have been here just once, in 1998, when the Red Wings swept them. The last decade in particular was wrought with playoff disappointment, often at the hands of either the Penguins (whom the Capitals beat in the second round) or the Rangers (who were terrible this year and didn’t sniff the playoffs). The Capitals came to these playoffs with fewer expectations than normal, but they’ve played better than ever. They’d lose Game 4 on this night, but they’d win two of the next three to advance.
Capitals games are an event. The get-in price for Games 3 and 4 of the Final will be among the highest ever for a hockey game — around $850 on secondary markets. The crowd during the conference final was as loud as any has ever been in that building, going off the opinion of some media types who have spent years in the press box there. Even Marlins Man showed up and made sure he had glass seats behind the Washington bench. The novelty of the event (and the Preakness being in Baltimore that weekend) drew him.
“I don’t think in my lifetime, I can ever remember the Capitals being this close to the finals,” Marlins Man, whose real name is Laurence Leavy, said. “I’m trying to think. I don’t think so.”
For a lot of people, the ‘98 run has understandably faded from view. What the Capitals are doing this spring feels entirely new, and in this era, it is. For Game 7 of the conference final, which was played in Florida, thousands turned up to watch in the Capitals’ arena.
Afterward, bunches of them poured out into the streets to celebrate on the steps of the National Portrait Gallery. In postseasons past, Penguins fans gathered there to taunt them after the latest crushing Capitals loss. This time, the steps were a sea of only red.
It makes sense that things feel different in the District now. The Capitals are giving their city something it hasn’t had in 20 years.
That’s a deep playoff run in any sport, save for D.C. United’s handful of championships in MLS. None of the big four local pro teams has played in a championship playoff round since the Capitals last did in ‘98. The city hasn’t had a championship of any kind since the Super Bowl at the end of the 1991 season. But that doesn’t fully get to the depth of it: No D.C. team had even made a conference final since the last time the Capitals made the Cup Final.
If the Capitals win the Stanley Cup, it probably won’t launch a fundamental overhaul of the city’s relationship with its sports teams. A lot of people will go to work in D.C. the next day and not realize it happened. But in the pockets of this region where people would bleed for this hockey team, it’ll be the most exciting thing in decades. That’s worth celebrating.
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