WASHINGTON — Drink it in, Washington. D.C. is now the hockey capital of the world.
The Capitals made relatively quick work of the Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup Final, dispatching the expansion franchise in five games to win the first championship in their 44-year history. It was a massive exhale for a team that had previously pissed away a pair of Presidents’ Trophy seasons and was known best for its breathtaking ability to underachieve.
Thursday’s series-clinching, 4-3 victory in Vegas not only liberated the Capitals of their playoff demons, it inspired their fans to show the world how great a sports town D.C. really is.
The focus on the quality of sports fans in Washington came into question last month, when former columnist at The Washington Post and current ESPN talking head Michael Wilbon called D.C. a “minor league sports town” in the wake of the seemingly over-celebrated second-round victory over the rival Pittsburgh Penguins. While the victory lap was premature, Washington has more than acquitted itself with the way it showed out during the Caps’ run to the Stanley Cup title.
The Capitals played only two home games in the series, but Northwest D.C. was flooded with Caps fans in and around Capital One Arena for all five games. Virtually everyone was “rockin’ the red” in the streets and at stadium watch parties, and fans were in stores purchasing championship gear in the wee morning hours immediately following the final horn.
These are not the actions of a “minor league sports town” compared to ho-hum sports markets like Miami and Atlanta. If anything, D.C. sports proved another point:
The problem with DC sports hasn’t been the fans, it’s been the teams. Ths Caps run showed how damn hungry the fans were. You don’t turn out like fans did unless there’s a strong element of passion and pride. The Fury was within; just needed something to help Unleash it.
— John Keim (@john_keim) June 8, 2018
A sports town is only as good as its teams. As much grief as Miami gets, that city was on fire about the Heat going to four straight NBA Finals. Nobody dismissed Atlanta as a sports town when the Braves were in their heyday in the early 1990s. Talk of Los Angeles as a lousy NFL city will surely subside if the Rams live up to their Super Bowl potential in 2018, and the city buys into the team’s aesthetically pleasing brand of football.
Washington’s “minor league” acts — like the Wizards infamously selling T-shirts commemorating a trip to the second round of the NBA Playoffs — weren’t born of some intrinsic value of mediocre achievements, but desperation for something, anything, good enough to celebrate. That’s unconscionable for anyone who lived here in the 1980s during the Redskins’ Camelot years.
The fact is, success in sports is cyclical. Franchises are good, even great, for a time and then they’re bad — and vice versa. The New England Patriots are perhaps the greatest dynasty in pro sports and they were a joke from 1960 until Bill Parcells showed up in 1993. The Cleveland Browns are currently synonymous with futility but they played in the championship game in each of the first 10 years of their existence.
D.C. sports were down for most of the last 26 years, thus making their long-suffering fans look like they wouldn’t know what do with success if they had it. Now that Lord Stanley’s Cup resides in the nation’s capital, and the Nationals and Wizards are plausibly good enough to mimic the Caps’ surprise title run, this could be the start of D.C. becoming the District of Champions.
