If you only know me through this website, my social media, or a professional organization like the AAG, then you might associate me with musical geography, ethnography, and possibly pedagogy. I’ve used sports extensively in my class curricula, but I think this is the first time that I’ve ever published anything about my personal and geographical relationship with sports. If you know me in person (especially over the past week), you know how big of a hockey fan I am and that I’m a huge fan of the Washington Capitals. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Just look at them.

via the Bellefontaine Examiner

I spent the last two weeks thinking about what I would write here in case they did, in fact, pull off the impossible and win their organization’s first Stanley Cup. However, I refused to write a single word until it actually happened, even in an unpublished draft. Whenever the Caps came up in conversation and anybody suggested things were looking pretty good, I bit my tongue, sealed my lips, and knocked on whatever wood was within arm’s reach. I even refused to mention the Cup directly on my friend’s sports podcast (much to his chagrin, I’m sure). I’m rarely superstitious, but if I wrote a mammoth spiel about the Capitals, what they’ve meant to me for the past 13 years, the geography lessons we can learn from their role in DC, and then they had somehow managed to blow their lead and lose? I would never live it down. I’m sure (some of) you understand. Now that the Caps are the Stanley Cup Champions (that still gives me chills to write), I can share some thoughts here. Let me set the stage:

Thursday, June 7. 8:15 PM. The Old City, Knoxville, TN. 

“You know, even if they don’t pull it off tonight, it’s really great to get to win it at home,” my friend Todd assured me. It was a nice gesture, but I remained a bundle of nerves, hesitating even to cross the street to watch the first period of Game 5 unfold between the Washington Capitals and Vegas Golden Knights. As far as I was concerned, the Caps could tool around and win the Cup at home some other year. It took the Chicago Blackhawks (my fourth-favorite NHL team) until their third championship this decade to win in front of their hometown faithful at the United Center. But this was a different dilemma; the Caps were my favorite NHL team and had been so (by a long shot) for almost thirteen years, ever since I realized how much I appreciated their hometown. This was their second time in the Stanley Cup Finals (their first since 1998, long before I became a fan), and the first time they were ever one win away from hoisting the hardware. I had been party to hockey fan-glory over the previous decade; I watched the Los Angeles Kings (my second-favorite team) run to two Cups in 2012* and 2014 and the Nashville Predators (my third-favorite) tear through the Western Conference in 2017 before getting stopped by the Pittsburgh Penguins (my 31st-favorite NHL team) in the Finals.

Over the past thirteen years, I watched the Capitals rebuild into an Eastern Conference powerhouse that seemed laughably unable to transcend a legacy of failure. Still, I stayed a proud fan, despite these pitfalls. In 2007, the team ditched an ugly color scheme in favor of their now-highly-recognizable red, white, and blue, complete with the iconic “Weagle.” They fired coach Glen Hanlon, hired Bruce Boudreau, and went on a tear in order to make the 2008 playoffs. For the next ten years, they would be a consistent contender with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Every year in the post-season, they would find a new, innovative way in which to crumble. If you’re reading this because another Caps blog brought you here, then I have no need to run through this still-somewhat-stinging history. But if you’re a hockey novice, then expect to be filled in as you read on why I’m sitting down and sharing this story of how I came to love (and repeatedly get burnt by) this team. Until now.

DC Life and a Brief History of my Fandom

Me in my Nicklas Backstrom shirt at Stonehenge in July 2009. I don’t love many photos of myself, but I love this one. The two most pertinent reasons are because (1) this was featured on On Frozen Blog (a successful Capitals fan site) that summer, and (2) I had seen Spinal Tap play “Stonehenge” at Wembley Arena the night before. That partially explains my expression.

Washington, DC: 2004-2006

I don’t remember the precise moment I decided to move to Washington, DC, but I can definitively say it came sometime over the weekend of October 15-17, 2004. I was down in the District visiting my sister at Georgetown University along with our folks, for Parents’ Weekend. It was her freshman year, and she was still getting acclimated to life there. Her most fiery sports fandom (Hoya basketball, a point of contention for me, a Syracuse fan) was just brewing. On that Sunday the 17th, though, the Boston Red Sox (who my family had been following for generations) began clawing back from a 3-0 deficit in the American League Championship Series, setting off a series of events that would rock the sports world and culminate, over the following two weeks, in the second-greatest moment of my life as a sports fan.

Over the course of that afternoon and evening, I took my first few Metro rides to visit some friends who were either spending the semester there or attending college there. The former were a group of Syracuse people (mostly with a public policy or political science focus) living in Woodley Park over their DC semester, rooting for the Red Sox (either out of love for the team, pure antipathy for the Yankees, a cocktail of the two). The latter, whose George Washington Campus apartment floor I slept on, was a friend I’d made in Madrid that Spring. She and her roommate were both from New York and were accordingly huge Yankees fans. I grinned as Mariano Rivera blew that save and sent the game into extra innings, my friend and her roommate yelling “Noooo!” at the TV. They were so salty that they insisted we all go to sleep before the inevitable David Ortiz game-winning home run in the 12th.

The following morning, before leaving to fly back to Syracuse, it all set in that (to draw somehow on the non-representational theory I had no idea existed yet), I just got such a good vibe from DC. The city was so quiet and peaceful for a Monday morning as I ambled through the streets of Georgetown toward my sister’s dorm. The “Mariano Rivera for Cy Young” poster drawn in Red Sox colors in a window I passed (right) was a nice, memorable touch. Within a year, I was going to live in this weird little federal city, and I couldn’t wait to discover what else it had to offer and make my own way. Unlike New York or Los Angeles, things seemed to just be more… accessible in DC, like the whole city was one big, friendly, idiosyncratic neighborhood. Many bands I had on heavy rotation at the time – Bad Brains, Minor Threat, The Dismemberment Plan, Jawbox, Q and Not U – were from there, so there had to be something in the water, right? My urban imaginary at such a young age was based on unfair assumptions, sure, but I’m still grateful I had it influencing me.

Ballston, Arlington VA, August 2005.

On August 22, 2005, my sister and I packed piles of our belongings into a borrowed minivan and hit the road for a traffic-laden drive down to DC. My erstwhile college roommate, Brian, was down there working an internship with the House and told me I could crash on his futon for a few weeks while looking for a job and a place of my own^. His apartment was a one-bedroom in a massive converted hotel next to the Ballston Commons Mall, which would become a crucial Caps location when they opened the Kettler Capitals Iceplex the following year. In the Summer of 2005, though, the whole block felt like it was going through some transition I could feel but not fully recognize. Recent college graduates were piling into these brutally overpriced rentals; Brian got the month-to-month at a “steal” for $1,100. When he and our friend Drew moved out that Fall, their hatbox went back on the market for $1,750 per month. Go back and reread that number. Remember this was in mid-2005. Ballston had a lot going on, but it was still fairly decentralized from where most of these yuppies worked, and on the days I slept in after Brian and Drew went to work, I have oddly specific memories of standing at the patio door, watching Arlington crushing the building across the way into history with a wrecking ball.

Urban geographers, sociologists, and economists have held DC in the same breath with redevelopment/gentrification for decades now, so I’m sure my story and reflections echo thousands of other accounts from that same era. But in that first crucial month I spent in the Washington Metropolitan Area (WMA; later rebranded as the DMV), I did not suspect that a godawful local hockey team would be the catalyst for me to embrace an alienating city as my beloved new home.

October 10, 2005

Though I don’t remember the exact moment or day I decided to move to DC, October 10, 2005 was the night that I became a Washington Capitals fan. The New York Rangers were coming to visit the MCI Center (now Capital One Arena), and legions of Caps fans were preparing their wrath for legendary mullet vessel Jaromir Jagr, who had recently the Caps on somewhat acrimonious terms. He was quoted in the Washington Post saying he would just as soon forget the few years he spent playing in Washington. That night, every. single. time. he touched the puck, the MCI center rained boos on him. The formidable Rangers were the clear favorites to win the game, but the Caps prevailed, and I had a blast watching it unfold.

There was another much more personal dynamic at work, though. My friend group at the time consisted largely of transplanted New Yorkers, whose trademark Big Apple metro-centrism often got on my nerves. I lost track of the number of times Brian, Drew, and I wound up at bars and clubs with the type of people who bragged about their fancy internships but could not wait to get back to New York – you know, a “real city.” I also lost track of how many times I rolled my eyes. At the time, I knew little about DC’s troubled and segregated history, so I usually just kept my mouth shut when people would prattle on about how disappointed they were that “our Nation’s Capital wasn’t nicer.” I would sometimes start arguments with the water-is-wet statement that DC wasn’t the same city as New York, Boston, or even Philly, nor was it trying to be. It would usually fall on deaf ears, though. Every time I heard some transient bash their host city, I started to like DC even more. Call it the me-against-the-world defiance you accrue at age 22, but it was all taking hold pretty quickly. To this day, I still get sick to my stomach whenever I hear someone whine about any  city, especially DC.

I remember sitting in the nosebleed seats at MCI that night as a flash point of all these urban-transplant emotions. Although I had grown up a huge Boston Bruins fan, Gary Bettman’s second lockout in 2004-2005 coincided with my coming-of-age. I still cared for the Bruins while I sat watching the Caps host the Rags (I was dumbfounded when Brian informed me that the Bruins had traded Joe Thornton to the Sharks), but my once-undying love had somehow withered into apathy. By the time the Bruins won a Stanley Cup in 2011, I felt nothing. In fact, my favorite non-riot-related moment of that whole series of events was watching Canucks fans cheer for the Vancouver native Milan Lucic when he lifted the trophy. I just thought it was sweet of them.

But I digress. My decision to immerse myself in DC Sports Fandom, especially given how my two favorite games were hockey and baseball, was a questionable one in 2005, because the Capitals and Nationals both suuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. On October 22nd, my close friend Jason came up from Virginia to visit his girlfriend at the time, who lived in the Maryland suburbs. I took them to watch the Caps face off against the Carolina Hurricanes, and the Caps got drubbed 4-0. Jason had never been to a hockey game before, but noted that every single time one of our guys had the puck, it looked like there were four of the other guys on them. It was an astute observation, and you could chalk that up to either the Hurricanes being a divisional powerhouse at the time or the Caps being especially listless.

Regardless, within a few months, no one could have steered me away from these teams. They hadn’t been handed down to me by my family; they were my teams. Cheering for my own teams may not have been the landmark that learning to drive or getting my own apartment may have been, but it did represent a break with my family’s New England roots. Within a season or two, though, my Dad followed suit and became a Caps fan. I must have been really convincing, because yes, the team did suck.

Of course, the Capitals had needed to suck in order to draft a certain somebody first overall in 2004 – a certain somebody who, thanks to the lockout, moved to DC right around the same time that I did: Alexander Ovechkin. You’ve probably heard of him.

Dainus Zubrus (L) and Alex Ovechkin (R) in 2005, Ovie’s rookie year. I include this photo also to show just how disgusting the Caps’ uniforms were for most of the 90’s and 00’s. The 2007 re-brand didn’t come soon enough. (Image via NoVa Caps).

The party line on my new favorite team in the sports media could often be distilled to “boy, this team is awful, but holy hell come and see this Ovechkin kid.” And this Ovechkin kid did produce. He ended the season with 52 goals, over 100 points, and an ungodly number of shots for a rookie literally anyone. Though he couldn’t “Lebron James” the Caps to a decent record that year, I can verify from watching him play (from both $10 nosebleed tickets and various bar televisions) that Ovie was truly the one-man highlight reel announcers kept labeling him.

As tempting as it can be, I won’t turn this into a diatribe praising Alex Ovechkin, as indispensable as he’s been both in the Caps’ successes and their visibility in popular culture. But before I move on, I will share my favorite Great Eight (Gr8) moment ever: April 24, 2009 against those Rangers in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals. I was at a hotel in Rochester with some friends, one of whom came looking for me at the work computer in the lobby because I’d been gone for so long. Although my buddy Jake wasn’t a big hockey fan, I made him sit down and watch this pure magic:

I can still barely believe my eyes when I watch him deke Derek Morris out of his skates and then, as he’s falling down, make Henrik Lundqvist look like an idiot and slide the puck through him. It was even funnier in retrospect how the Rangers had acquired Morris at the trade deadline to help prevent this exact kind of thing from happening. Every Caps fan has their favorite Ovechkin moment, and that one’s mine. This one, from that February, is a close second, though.

The Letdown Years, an Introduction

Sometime in 2006, I wrote a blog post about how awesome the Washington Capitals were, even though their record made no indication of that. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but I’ll try to place myself in that mindset and recreate it here as I explain the extraordinary transformation of 2007-2008. I hit a career milestone… in that I got a job and started my first career in May 2007. Thanks in part to the boss’ recognition of my Syracuse credentials, I landed a position as an Assistant Account Executive at a small public relations firm in the National Press Building. I didn’t mind that I was “working for the clampdown,” as another one of my heroes, Joe Strummer, once put it. My coworkers were an interesting bunch, all around my age, and would all eventually get swept up into Caps fever despite the crushing playoff disappointments that awaited us for my whole tenure at the company. Believe it or not, my coworkers would all witness the 2010 Game 7 meltdown in person when my boss surprised them with tickets. I got over it, though, since I was on a plane to Germany while it happened.

Here’s some more context for the non-hockey fans (if you’re still reading). At the beginning of the 2007 season, a second shining star appeared in the Caps’ sky: a fresh-faced kid from Sweden named Nicklas Backstrom. If you saw the Cup ceremony from Thursday night, then you saw Ovechkin pass the Stanley Cup to him after receiving it from Gary Bettman (as if there was ever any doubt).  I recently found a team yearbook from 2009, and Ovie and Backs were the only two Caps whose tenure with the organization stretched to the previous decade. It became clear that the franchise had no choice but to rebuild itself around these two flashy kids, and over Thanksgiving 2007 Caps GM George McPhee and owner (AOL impresario) Ted Leonsis fired coach Glen Hanlon. They called Bruce Boudreau up from their AHL farm team the Hershey Bears to fill the seat.

Boudreau would become an increasingly divisive figure (see: his inability to close in the post-season), but as soon as he joined as head coach, the Caps caught on fire. They turned their season around and went on a historic run to nudge their way into the 2008 playoffs. Suddenly, the city was waking up to them. Also, Alex Ovechkin scored 65 goals that season, won all four major individual NHL awards, and received the Key to the City from Mayor Adrian Fenty. Here is some shaky footage of that ceremony I found on YouTube. If you watch it with a fine-toothed comb, you may see me in the crowd in my business-casual attire. I worked a block away from DC City Hall, so I sneaked over there on my lunch break. I’ll never forget seeing Marion Barry, still working for the city, sitting on the ground next to the entrance in his baby blue suit.

It felt gratifying to see my adopted city embrace its hockey team that year. The Caps pushed the Philadelphia Flyers (my 30th-favorite NHL team) to a Game 7 Overtime, which exceeded expectations anybody had of them. Their faces started appearing more frequently in the commuter Express paper, which I read every morning on the Orange line to Metro Center. My coworkers started asking me about the team, as I was the only bona fide hockey fan at the firm. The fact that the Redskins had descended into some kind of Rube Goldberg script at that point (the Albert Haynesworth signing**, coupled with the controversy over their name, certainly didn’t help things) also helped push the Caps further into the city’s consciousness. I’ll admit how cool it felt to see people on message boards and (in the then-new term) IRL asking me when the next Caps game was, dejected at whatever stunt Dan Snyder had just pulled. Friends who had cast dispersion on the Caps and the NHL at large were started to systematically delete those posts from their blogs and MySpace. The zeitgeist was real***.

Of course, Ted Leonsis had made his millions from the internet, so he was no fool. By the 2008-2009 season, the Caps were suddenly a “favorite” of many gamblers, and ticket prices responded. Gone were the days of schlubs like me plopping down a $10 bill at the MCI box office and heading up to the rafters. Mid-level tickets cost ungodly amounts of money, and so the lower echelons of DC’s middle class began getting squeezed out of direct participation with the team. The Washington City Paper and other alternative outlets took exception to this capitalist blow-back on the long-suffering yet loyal fans. The Nats, also crawling into competitive stature, built an “office park of a stadium” (h/t Will Stilwell aka Loud Goat) on the Southwest Waterfront, displacing pre-War communities of color and charging $8 for a beer. Unlike with the Caps and Wizards, scraping-by fans barely had that window of “suck” through which to climb into the stands for a reasonable price, at least not since they moved out of the crumbling RFK stadium. I did always respect DC United for sticking around there, considering how paltry their crowds looked in that cavernous bowl.

On Moonlighting as a Hockey Reporter

In late 2008, my coworker Forest, who had been covering Georgetown Men’s Basketball for his friend Wendell’s low-budget sports blog, mentioned they were looking for a hockey guy. Though I didn’t have much sports journalism experience, I jumped at the chance. Caps press credentials were becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, but Wendell had gotten in right before the gate closed. Whenever the Caps played a home game, I would walk over to the (renamed) Verizon Center, flash my badge, and join the press junket for their pre-game meal in the bowels of the arena. Though I was on the bottom of the totem pole, both home and visiting hockey journos were incredibly welcoming. I got to sit up in “the halo” to watch the games and take notes, mingling with personalities like video guy/backup backup goalie Brett Leonhardt and web guy Mike Vogel. In one of my prouder moments, I informed Vogel of his more-than-passing resemblance to Robyn Hitchcock, to which Leonhardt and a scrum of journalists gasped and laughed when a then-beardless Vogel pulled up a photo of the singer. I also met Australian hockey super-fan Sasky Stewart, who had sent internship applications to every NHL franchise that winter, but was in DC because you-know-who were the only one to give her the time of day. She was the first person I thought of a month ago when Nathan Walker assisted on Alex Chaisson’s goal in Game 6 against the Pens, the first playoff point ever earned by an Australian player in the NHL.

Generally, I spent most of that season trying to do my job and not make waves. I was so timid that I doubt I even took any pictures. I don’t know if any of the post-game videos exist on the Caps’ website, but you can occasionally spot me in the background of the locker room, in well over my head but having a great time. I’m still in awe of how cool everyone was, and as much as I may have deserved it, nobody ever big-timed me. Also, I have distinct memories of Karl Alzner and Tomas Fleischmann being cool as hell to me whenever I passed them on the concourse. Remember what I said about DC being accessible? Here it was. I also gorged on free popcorn in the press box.

My press credential had run its course by the 2009 playoffs – the first time the Caps entered as a favorite. This was not a level of pressure they could withstand, apparently. They pulled off an amazing come-from-behind victory over the Rangers in round one, only to crumble in Game 7 against the Penguins (after pushing them to seven games, too). I’ll never forget watching the Caps, with the eyes of the hockey world on them, get blown out on home ice by the eventual Cup winners. I sat, dejectedly, in a nondescript bar on U Street, waiting for my friend Jana to come meet me. She got delayed, so I waited to order a drink in case she needed me to meet her elsewhere. As it became increasingly obvious the Penguins were going to embarrass the Caps in one of the most over-hyped games in either team’s history, a woman walked over to me. “If you don’t buy anything, you’re going to have to leave.” Her words hit me especially hard in that moment. U Street, which I had been watching rapidly and steadily gentrifying over the four years prior, was now where I could go to get kicked out of a bar for sitting and quietly watching television. As Cr*sby picked Alex Ovechkin’s pocket at center ice and skated it in for a breakaway goal, I gave up and walked out. I couldn’t stop thinking about this moment last month in that magical moment in Game 6, when Ovechkin picked Cr*sby’s pocket at the blue line, dished it up to Kuzy, and they finally, finally twisted the dagger on that team I hate so much.

The 2009-2010 season was another animal. The Caps reached 121 points in the standings and ran away with the Presidents’ Trophy. They also went up 3-1 against the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs (inspiring some Quebecois ire) before losing three straight to Jaroslav Halak. Hockey is perhaps the most “team sport” of the team sports, but never before had I seen a decent goaltender catch fire and buckle the best team in hockey.  It was tantamount to Stephen Curry defeating Georgetown single-handed in the 2008 tournament. Basketball is a team sport, too, most of the time. At any rate, the Caps front office rewarded fans’ grief with the biggest ticket price spike in their history.

2010 was also the year I decided, for reasons unrelated, that I was ready to leave DC. I had known since the day I’d finished undergrad that I would attend grad school for Geography some day. Unlike the moments in which I decided to move to DC and wherein I became a lifelong fan of the Washington Capitals, I cannot narrow down to a single weekend the moment I felt officially ready to leave. But it was unquestionably in the Fall of 2010 that I realized that “some day” was coming. That season, I remember going to a game on February 6, 2011 – a Caps/Pens match-up on a Sunday matinee (just like old times). My decision to go was an impulsive, last-minute choice. I obviously couldn’t waltz into the box office with a Hamilton anymore. I had to hand a wad of cash to a scalper in order to get a nosebleed seat, but the game was a decent time. The Caps won 3-0 in the absence of some of the Pens’ superstars, and I left with a slight suspicion that this would be my last time in the “phone booth” for a while. I haven’t been back inside there since.

In fact, I’ve only seen the Caps play in person once since then: March 30, 2014 in Nashville, as an early birthday present. The Caps lost in the shootout, but they got a point out of it. They missed the playoffs that season, and I still don’t get how it was possible for a team with Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom to do that. In retrospect, though, it may have been Ovechkin’s -35 rating, Backstrom’s -20, Adam Oates’ sub-par coaching, or how nobody else had a career year. Thanks, Hockey-Reference.com. My favorite memory from that game was hanging out with some wonderfully gracious Preds fans, which moved their team way up within my ranking of favorite NHL teams. Seeing Preds gear on students all over campus has been nice these past few years teaching at UTK.

Nashville’s run through the Western Conference in the 2017 playoffs was also incredible to watch after the Caps took their annual, underwhelming exit against the Pens in Round Two. Seeing how brilliantly the Predators got the Nashville and greater Tennessee community involved was nothing short of inspiring. I can’t wait to see that team win their first Cup; they did more for hockey in the South by making the Finals than the Stars or Hurricanes did by winning.

Via NHL.com. P.K. Subban’s well-documented swagger on display as he greets fans.

Though I couldn’t make it to Nashville to experience the Stanley Cup fever firsthand, I loved the attention the team and their fans were getting. Also, based on photo sets I was seeing online, I had never witnessed such a diverse fan-base as the Preds’. The crowd partying outside of Capital One exhibited a diverse fan-base in DC as well. Race is never simple to discuss, but considering how far the discussion has advanced in the NFL, I’m glad to see the NHL engaging so constructively. For the least racially diverse major sport in North America, the NHL has done well proving that Hockey is for Everyone. Like NASCAR, an increasing number of the sport’s rising stars are coming from minority backgrounds, and Nashvegas made that increasingly visible last year.

On a more molecular level, though, there had to be some college grads moving to the fast-growing Nashville for their first jobs, and the Preds have given them something to rally around as the Caps did for me. Like the Caps did for DC at large, maybe the Preds also provide a solid communal mooring for people afraid of their city losing so much of its character to development. There’s always room for discussion here.

Thursday, June 7. 10:39 PM. The Old City, Knoxville, TN. 

I sat along at a table at the Urban Bar, wringing my hands and slowly draining my beer (when I remembered it was sitting in front of me). Todd and I had watched the scoreless first period of Game 5 before he left for his bar shift. I decided to bike over to a bar in Market Square to see if I would run into anybody I knew. My other hockey-fan friends were either out of town or home for the night. I’d seen nobody familiar and a panoply of annoying strangers in Market Square, so I came back down to Urban Bar for the third period. Also, the Knights outscored the Caps 3-2 in the wild second period, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to reset my location (again, I’m rarely this superstitious). It’s always an adventure navigating the bar scene in Tennessee when you want to watch a hockey team who isn’t the Predators, even if it is the Cup Finals.

via the Urban Bar’s website.

Plus, Urban Bar was where I’d been watching when Evgeni Kuznetsov ended Game Six against the Penguins. When it happened (watch this video at least 15 times), I was sitting with Todd and our friends John and Alexis, and I yelled so loudly that the whole bar turned and looked at me. I may have also said something cruel about Pittsburgh, which I quickly redacted because I love that city as much as I hate its hockey team. I also enthusiastically yelled “they’re showing it again!” every time the NHL network replayed it into the night. In that moment, it did seem like anything was possible. Even if the Caps didn’t make it past the Lightning in the Eastern Conference Finals, we’d always have this moment of watching S*dney Cr*sby skate away sadly as the Caps celebrated in the background.

Around 10:39 PM on June 7th, the Caps still trailed by a goal, but I remained optimistic. After all, they led the series 3-1. Still, the garden variety of playoff failures over the years still swam around in my brain. The Caps had proven over the previous decade that they were capable of blowing this. Every time the NBCSN directors cut to a shot of the massive swarm of bouncing red at the corner of 7th and G Street, my heart swelled. Those were my people. DC Love and all that. If I hadn’t left, I would be in that swarm. Suddenly, what would have been unthinkable (ca. 2009-2017) happened: Devante Smith-Pelly, one of my favorite players, pulled acrobatics and tied the game. At 10:41, I sent a voice message text to my sister wherein I declared him to be “the greatest human being ever to live.” Again, rope in non-representational theory to explain why I would say something like that in the heat of the moment. It may also be because Devante Smith-Pelly is a golden god. JUST WATCH. 

My single favorite tweet of the entire postseason came from J.P. of Japer’s Rink, who said after game 2 that “guess this is what 43 years of banked luck looks like.” The Caps had gotten a lot of lucky bounces and supernatural saves from Braden Holtby, but I’m a stern believer in the axiom that good luck is still something one still needs to work for. Nobody has ever won a championship, paid their rent, or bought a house with lucky bounces, indie cred, or exposure.

Within minutes, Lars Eller slid in behind Marc-Andre Fleury and banked the game-winning goal. The Caps were suddenly in the lead, and they would not surrender it. With two minutes remaining, Todd materialized to watch the clock run out and the Caps celebrate. Though they narrowly missed the Golden Knights’ empty net a couple times, the Caps protected their lead, and years of pain dissolved and floated away into the atmosphere above the DC Beltway.

I spent the next few hours, when I wasn’t excitedly texting with old friends and chatting on the phone with my father, high-fiving strangers and finding places to watch the post-game interviews at full volume. I biked home that night on pure adrenaline, excited to get on YouTube to relive moments from that night and plunge into the ninth circle of Capitals twitter.  I eventually got to sleep, unaware that over the next few days, something truly remarkable would happen that brought so many of my thoughts and emotions about DC, cultural geography, and this team together in an elaborate, shambolic package.

As I write this, the Caps are probably either hung over or still partying in the streets of DC. After doing press in Las Vegas, Ovechkin brought the Stanley Cup to a nightclub, where he hung out in the DJ booth with Tiësto (because of course they are friends). The team flew home in the morning, and Ovie and Backstrom carried the Cup off the plane to a raucous ovation. On Saturday afternoon, the team went to the Nats game with the Cup and Ovechkin threw out the ceremonial first pitch (twice). Within a day, footage started to emerge of about six Caps partying on the Georgetown waterfront and jumping into a fountain with incredulous fans. They invaded the Georgetown high-society joint Cafe Milano, where they interrupted a dinner date between Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. No matter where your politics sit, DC is just so surreal and awesome sometimes.

Via WJLA. Six members of the Caps, decked out in Nationals gear from the game earlier, invade Cafe Milano. Ivanka Trump is appropriately star-struck, and (again, owing this observation to Loud Goat Stilwell) Ovechkin is WEARING TWO HATS.

So where does this intersect with DC’s (sub)cultural geography? In the brief period where I had some access to the Capitals In-Game Entertainment, I never worked up the nerve to campaign to get Minor Threat’s “Seeing Red” playing at games. But as history since 1980 has shown, harDCore has its subversive ways of leaking into the mainstream landscape. Earlier today, my old friend Matt, who runs a punk record shop and boutique in Adams-Morgan, posted pictures of himself with the Stanley Cup from last night. Apparently, he was on his way home from a show and decided he was going to swing by Georgetown and literally get his hands on some history. The door was locked when he got to the restaurant in question, but Backstrom and Oshie soon emerged with the Cup in their hands. Below is the result of the scrum of fans who, understandably, went nuts.

A variety of bloggers have tried making sense out of the team’s prolonged street-level celebration. One of my favorite posts anthologized Jakub Vrana’s snapchat stories from the night, which chronicled their adventures as they passed through Georgetown and Adams-Morgan, mingling with fans and pouring money into local businesses (i.e. pubs and tattoo shops). At this rate, I wouldn’t put it past the team to record their own version of “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” but with a version in a harDCore style on Side A and a version in a Go-Go style on Side B.

While their front office may have spent the last decade jacking up ticket prices and squeezing loyal fans out of direct participation, the Caps have spent the past 72 hours bringing the party right back to the streets of DC and in the arms (and selfies) of those fans. As obnoxious as some of their antics may be, they are sharing their reward with the supporters who lived and died with them over the years. This was the type of celebration I could have only fantasized about throughout the Letdown Years. I can only imagine what their victory parade is going to look like tomorrow.

Once again, congratulations to the Washington Capitals for pulling this off, and to all their lifelong fans who were suffering for much longer than I was. As I posted in #ALLCAPS on Thursday night and I think I made clear enough here, I love this f@#&ing team, and I love (and miss) this f#*@king city. Thank you for reading.

BONUS TRACKS

* For those who are fans of ironies to end all ironies, here’s an anecdote for you. Though the Caps were still my favorite, I became a de facto Kings fan in 2011 after moving to Long Beach to get my Master’s Degree at Cal State. I liked most of the players and most of my friends out there, including several geographers who’ve appeared on this site in some form, were Kings fans. One geographer, Emily, invited me to join her for the Kings’ Game 3 against the Phoenix Coyotes in the 2012 Western Conference Finals – a text that arrived like manna from heaven on May 12, within an hour of seeing the Caps lose their own Eastern Conference Semifinals Game 7 to the New York Rangers. I still remember how great it felt when I read her text, which I think I told her when we went to the Staples Center the following week. In case I didn’t though, I’ll make sure she sees this. ANYWAY, the Kings would make short work of the Coyotes and head to the Cup Finals against the New Jersey Devils, who they defeated in six games to win their first Championship. Though I’d managed to watch most of the Kings’ games with my Long Beach friends, I couldn’t be there to celebrate with them the night they won (June 11th) because I was in DC, forcing an apathetic friend to turn the game on so I could at least see it happen live. In retrospect, this irony isn’t really “an irony to end all ironies,” but I’m not going back to edit that.

Dustin Brown chats with fans before Game 3 of the 2012 Western Conference Finals. Taken with my grainy camera phone.

^The fact that someone in my position could move to anywhere in the DMV on pure speculation just because they felt like giving it a shot, anytime this century, may sound like the most unbelievable thing about this entire entry. Whenever I talk to a friend who’s moved to DC in the past decade, I tell them about the pretenses I moved there under, and they rarely believe me. How times have changed.

** A decade ago, I had no idea I would ever live and work in Knoxville, where Albert Haynesworth is still regarded as a UTK legend today (and shows up, in his gigantic tank of a Humvee, to parties in the Old City). A couple years ago, I was waiting on my order at a short-lived burger joint on the UT Cumberland Strip, and I noticed they had a framed Haynesworth Volunteers jersey on the wall. I took a picture, and sent it to my best friend from my DC life and a big Skins fan, Evan. He replied, “it’s like an image from some sh*tty dream!” That signing is still among the worst in NFL history.

*** Though I’m not as big of an NBA fan, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include my favorite Bullets Wizards story from this “zeitgeist 2008” moment. While the Caps were dashing into the playoffs with a head full of steam, so were the Wiz, albeit against Lebron James in his original run with the Cavaliers. The Cavs won the first two games in Cleveland, and someone on the Wizards (I believe DeShawn Stevenson) made some comments about King James’ play. LeBron, most likely goaded by someone in the sports press, replied that “DeShawn Stevenson telling me how to play basketball is like Soulja Boy telling Jay-Z how to rap.” What James hadn’t considered what that Soulja Boy, the king of the one-hit-wonder club hit, was either planning (or available) to come to Game 3 with a bunch of his friends from DC. The Wizards management arranged to have Soulja Boy and his whole crew sit behind the Cavs’ bench, and the Verizon Center blasted “Crank That” during every other stoppage in play. Though it hasn’t happened often in LeBron’s career, DC exposed a chink in his armor and got inside his head. The Wizards annihilated the Cavaliers that night. They lost the series, but this made for one of my favorite unheralded NBA stories.