Goal Oriented

That was about to change.

Once Alex skated onto the ice, he no longer heard the fans in the stand. He was focusing too intently on the puck: that three-inch-wide disc of black vulcanized rubber that had been skidding 100 mph though all his dreams, waking or slumbering, since childhood. Nearly 12 minutes into the third period, Alex scooped the puck in his stick and drove toward the Phoenix goal with defenseman Paul Mara guarding closely. Alex cut right to left in front of the goal, preparing to fire the puck backhanded into the net.

That's when Mara knocked Alex off his feet and sent him hurtling headfirst away from the net. "When I was going down, when I was about to fall to the ice," Alex recalled, "I saw the goal. When I fell down, I didn't see the goal anymore, but I saw the puck."

Skidding along the ice on his back, arms stretched high over his head, only one hand still gripping his stick, Alex reached out to flick the puck precisely where intuition told him the net should be.

Once he managed to stand up, he wasn't sure he had really scored until he saw teammates running across the ice reaching out to hug him. "I was a little bit shocked," he said.

"He may have been the only guy who could score that goal," the stunned announcer told the crowd. "Alexander the Great!"

The sense of collective awe in the stadium only grew as the replay of Alex's improbable goal appeared on a giant screen overhead. What would soon become known simply as "The Goal" wasn't just a lucky shot. "As he fell, he had presence of mind to change the angle of his hand and his stick so that he could kind of shoot with the stick behind his head," Ollie Kolzig, the Capitals' veteran goalie recalled. "Unless you've played hockey, you don't understand how difficult that is. Once we saw that on replay, we all lost our minds on the bench . . . A talent like his only comes by once in a lifetime."

In all the world of hockey, only Alex's parents seemed not to be awestruck by their son's feat. It was as if they expected nothing less. "My first thought was, Well, you can score that way, too," recalled Mikhail, who watched the game live on NTV-Plus cable back in Russia. "He's scored lots of interesting goals. You always have to be ready to score from any situation."

Tatiana didn't leap up in amazement or cheer when she saw The Goal. Instead, she thought of the words to a popular Russian song glorifying individual sacrifice for the common good: "We need one victory, one for all, regardless of the price."

Alex is signing hockey sticks -- 400, to be precise. The sticks, premiums for season ticket holders, are stacked atop several long folding tables in the Capitals' home arena, Verizon Center in Chinatown. Alex is working his way down the line with a silver Sharpie.

The Capitals offered the season ticket holders the choice of a stick signed by Alex or by goalie Kolzig. Most opted for Alex's autograph. "Poor kid's arm is going to be broke," a team official said, shaking his head, as he passed by.

"I have to do it because fans must come to watch our game," Alex said earnestly.

By this point, a day in mid-September, it's been just over a year since the Siberian conference call. Alex has had a season to adjust to the surreal demands and bounty of his new life in America. And what a season. He became the second rookie ever to score more than 50 goals and 100 points, and he won a landslide vote to be named the NHL 2005-06 rookie of the year. He earned every bonus possible under his Capitals' contract and finished the season with at least $4.25 million in hockey paychecks. He also earned an undisclosed sum in deals to endorse hockey equipment.

Last year, Alex, arrived from Russia speaking little English. When a team official tried to hand him cash to pay for his meals during training camp, Alex initially refused to accept. Thinking that the guy was trying to pay him to autograph hockey sticks, Alex, raised to be scrupulously polite, insisted he was happy to sign for free. Now, the Capitals star knows enough English to joke in his second language.

"Nickname?" a Capitals employee asked Alex as the team lined up for preseason processing.

"Ovie," he said "Any other nicknames?" she asked, scribbling on her clipboard.

"Sex Bomb," he said with a straight face, then waited for her to look up from her clipboard before laughing.

Alex doesn't stand in line much. He is more in demand for interviews and promotions than his teammates and is hustled from one commitment to the next all day; he's on a short list of players the NHL is promoting to help popularize the sport. Ever since the lockout, hockey has been struggling to regain its former toehold as the fourth major sport in the United States. The league has adopted rules changes to make the game faster-paced and more exciting. Ticket sales have increased, but large arenas such as the Verizon Center still have thousands of empty seats on hockey nights. Television ratings are down. After the agony of the lockout and the Capitals' own cost-cutting reorganization, Alex is like an antidote to the pain, team owner Ted Leonsis said. Other teams clamor for Alex to play their arenas, Leonsis said. "This guy is becoming a folk hero in hockey," he said. "No one has seen in a long, long time this rare combination of speed, strength, skill and absolute passion for the game. And, he's a nice kid . . . That's where we really hit the jackpot. The new NHL has to be very fan-centric. This young man loves everything about the game. He loves the fans. You can't script that."

On this day, the sports reporters ask Alex the same questions over and over. Does he worry that his rookie streak of goals will end in a sophomore slump? What is the state of his much-hyped ongoing rivalry with hockey's other hot young player, Crosby?

"I don't listen to this," Alex answers again and again. "I just concentrate on hockey."

Alex's father, who is visiting from Russia, waits all day on a folding chair just outside the locker room. He doesn't speak English, so there's not much he can do here. He just likes being near his son. Before Alex can drive his father home, he has to pose for a rinkside photo with Kolzig. After Alex, Kolzig is the Caps' biggest star. The photographer explains that the story is about Alex but that Kolzig is quoted in it.

"Big smiles," the photographer urges the two massive men as they pose together wearing Caps jerseys. "Give him a noogie," he directs Kolzig as he snaps away. "That's right. Give him a noogie."

When someone with the team stops to watch the photo shoot, Kolzig explains that he's helping out with a story about Alex. "That's all I seem to be doing this year," the 36-year-old goalie said.

"SASHA."

"Sasha!"

One of Alex's agents, Susanna Goruven, was gripping the dashboard of his new white BMW M6 as the hockey player accelerated toward a red light.

"Sasha!" she cried.

Alex hits the brakes. He grinned at her. His window was all the way down. Russian techno pop was blaring from his speakers, making downtown Arlington sound like a Moscow disco. Alex was dancing in his red leather bucket seat and singing along. This particular song, he said, was about "one boy, 25 girlfriends."

"No," he said, smiling into the rearview mirror. "I'm joking."

Alex was on his way home after visiting a T-Mobile kiosk at Ballston Commons Mall. Goruven came along to help negotiate the intricacies of international roaming and text-messaging charges. Alex came home with a new cellphone, a family and friends plan, and a SIM memory card for his older brother Mikhail's phone.

The brothers live in a four-bedroom, Federal-style brick house near downtown Arlington. Alex bought it in Fall 2005 for just over $1.5 million. Mikhail, 24, who lives in the United States part of the year to study English and keep his brother company, doesn't play sports. He unilaterally ended his own sports career at age 10. "It didn't work out," he recalled. "One day, suddenly, I woke up, and decided I didn't want." He informed his parents. "They took it fine," he said. Now he watches sports on the big flat-screen TV in the den with the new taupe leather furniture.

At the moment, the brothers have a full house. In addition to their parents visiting from Moscow, Goruven is in from Canada, and Alex's girlfriend is about to arrive from St. Petersburg, where she is a student at St. Petersburg State University of Economics and Finance. There is no mistaking who lives here. The Ovechkins, in the Russian custom, take their shoes off at the front door. The marble foyer is covered with a rainbow of Alex's sports shoes and a few pairs of size 10 pumps belonging to his mom. The walls, the bookcases, mantel and glass-front kitchen cabinets are lined with Alex's hockey memorabilia: photos of him, his Russian national team jersey, the puck with which he scored The Goal. A stray jock strap rests on one kitchen counter.

It is a beautiful house, with stainless appliances in the outsize kitchen and a big deck out back. Alex's mother, who is helping him decorate, arrived with curtains and pillows she'd had made in Moscow. This home, nice as it is, was never part of Alex's dream, his father said. "He'd live in a toolshed if you let him play hockey."

Most days, Alex rises just in time to brush his teeth and hair and race to practice. When it's over, he lunches, then naps. Evenings when he doesn't have a game, he often spends quiet time with family playing cards or watching movies. He likes light comedies, such as "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days," he said. They help relieve the pressures of everyone's expectations, especially his own.

On the kitchen table one recent afternoon, Tatiana spread a large lunch of borscht, pickled herring, fried fish fillets, hearty bread and an apple cake she had just baked. "When we are here, my brother and me alone, no food -- nothing," Alex said as he speared a chunk of pickled herring. "We order some pizza, some sushi."

When his mother is back in Russia, where she is still president of Moscow Dynamo's women's basketball team, Alex occasionally tries to prepare simple dishes for himself, but needs help. "I just call my mom and say, 'What am I supposed to do?'" he said.

After lunch, Alex stretched out on a sofa in the living room. He put his bare feet up on the cream damask and arched them as his mother stood over him stroking his brown curly hair tenderly. Mother and son beamed.

Some things never change. Some do. Alex's parents, accustomed to overseeing every aspect of his career and finances in Russia, have had to cede some control to their son, his agents and the Capitals. They are all trying to adjust to a culture in which the greatest athletes are celebrities pressed to be sports promoters.

"It's a bit surprising to me," Tatiana said. "I'm a little bit taken aback at this. Here it's normal for a kid this young to be so much exposed and do a lot of meetings with the press or the fans. When he was in Russia, I was very much against him being so much exposed to the public. I have to recognize the fact that this is a different country, and different rules apply. But, to me, sports are sports. And everything else is everything else."

She trusts her son to negotiate his strange new world, she said, and not to get distracted. "He can take care of himself," his mother said. "Hockey is a very difficult sport. It's not like chess or golf. You have to be a real man, a strong man and a very brave man to play hockey."

But Alex still has help from some fierce women. Goruven, who works for agent Meehan, helps Alex negotiate transactions from buying his house and car to getting the right hockey sticks. One day in the preseason, new custom sticks arrived from a company with which Alex has an endorsement deal. A recent NHL rule change allows for a greater curve on stick plates. Since Alex, like other European skaters, grew up playing with more curved sticks than the NHL previously allowed, he expected the new rule to be a boon to his performance. When the prototypes for his new sticks arrived, however, he decided the configuration of the curve wasn't quite right.

"This is horrible," Goruven yelled into her cellphone at a company representative. "It's not acceptable." She paced around Alex's home office as she spewed. Alex sat at his computer quietly.

"It's unacceptable," Goruven sputtered into the phone. "Unacceptable. Unacceptable. Not for this kind of player. Make sure it's right this time." She hung up.

"Poor Susanna," Alex said sweetly.

The SUV nosed out of the Verizon Center's underground parking garage and inched up the ramp. In the back seat, Alex and his girlfriend traded kisses and murmured to each other in Russian. Up ahead, a few female hockey fans, shapeless in their Capitals jerseys, spotted the SUV and stirred.

"This is the reason why we're in this car and not walking," the team's promotions manager said. "The place is 20 yards away. But if there are fans outside, I don't want him walking into a feeding frenzy."

It was 10:25 p.m. on a mid-September evening. The Capitals had just lost their first preseason game to the Tampa Bay Lightning. Alex hadn't scored. Now he was tired and uncharacteristically subdued. He'd just showered, but was still sweating from the game. Veronica blew lightly on his damp face to cool him down.

Down Sixth Street NW, R&R Bar was crowded with rowdy fans swigging Budweiser, waiting and chanting: O-vie! O-vie! O-vie! DC-101 disc jockey Elliot Segal was hosting a promotional event billed as a 21st birthday bash for Alex; the hockey star's actual birthday was three days earlier. Chris Lewis, the Capitals' director of promotions, ran down the schedule: pictures, autographs and the ceremonial cutting of a birthday cake.

"Then I'm free?" Alex said hopefully.

"Yeah."

It was late for Alex to be doing this. He had practice in the morning. The Capitals needed this promotion more than he did. Polite and compliant, Alex didn't say that. He flashed a tentative smile. "Let's do it," he said, as he stepped into the alley wearing a dark blue pinstriped suit and a two-day beard.

"Dolce," he said, tugging at the lapel of his suit, made by his favorite designers, Dolce & Gabbana. "Gucci," he said, pointing to his black loafers. He seemed both pleased and slightly embarrassed.

In the alley to meet him was Nate Ewell, the Capitals' 32-year-old director of media relations, looking solemn. Inside the bar was a bacchanal. Ewell didn't want this promotion to undermine Alex's wholesome image. "If you want anything to drink," Ewell told him, "I'll hold it."

Alex had no room to maneuver in the packed bar as fans lunged forward offering insistent high-fives and objects to autograph. As the lights on the television cameras blinked on, someone handed Alex a big glass of beer.

"Listen, I want you to go easy on him," Elliot told the crowd in circus-master tones. "It's his first time being legal to have something to drink."

"What's up, guys?" Alex called to the crowd. "Thanks for coming, and cheers."

He took a sip of beer then put the glass down. Revelers broke into a draggy, atonal rendition of "Happy Birthday." Alex furiously signed his name on anything anyone thrust at him, pausing only to wipe sweat from his face with the sleeve of his Dolce & Gabbana suit.

"Ease up, fella," a bouncer said to one overzealous fan. It was no use. One fan after another rushed forward to pose, grinning, next to the famous hockey player, who took another sip of beer.

"Put your drink down," the fresh-faced Ewell muttered sotto voce. "No pictures with your drink."

Downstairs was more pandemonium. Hip-hop music blared. Elliot's microphone didn't work. "WE L-O-O-O-O-V-E YOU!" a young woman screamed at an excruciating volume.

"Thank you very much," Alex said mildly.

"O-VIE! O-VIE! O-VIE!" the crowd chanted.

"Who?" Alex called back to them playfully. "Who?"

A hefty woman standing directly in front of him began unbuttoning her shirt.

"Whenever you are ready," Ewell told Alex nervously, indicating that it may be time to beat a hasty exit. Too late. The woman finished unbuttoning her shirt and presented her left breast for Alex to autograph. She was a very big fan. Alex, grinning, signed. "He's a rock star," Ewell said.

TATIANA AND MIKHAIL OVECHKIN SAT ALONE in the stands for the Capitals' first home game of the season on October 7.

Tatiana, as is her custom, dressed as if for the theater: dark clothes and a single strand of pearls. "Hockey is a bit like theater in a way," her husband said. "Every time there is a line change, it's like a change of decoration or new actors in a theatrical play. The story is going to go another way. Then, of course, it will change again. There is always a plot to the story of a game, shifting characters and action. There is a beauty to it. Somebody is always trying to make a masterpiece out of it. You sit there and wait for that to happen."

The Ovechkins could have been comfortably ensconced with other VIPs in the owner's suite or eating prime rib at a table overlooking the ice at the plush Acela Club. Instead, they took seats with ordinary ticket-buyers. Tatiana likes to concentrate on the action without the distraction of polite chitchat or waiters taking orders. She wanted to focus on her son's every move. "I mutter to myself," she said. "I swear to myself. I celebrate by myself. I try to tune in to his mental field."

The pressure on her son had been building for weeks. He had gone five games without a single goal: four in the preseason, then the dreadful season opener against the New York Rangers, a 5-2 loss. If you counted last season's final game, Alex's goalless streak was six games. It was beginning to feel like the curse of the sophomore slump wasn't just something sports writers asked about.

Down on the ice, Alex wasn't worrying about slumps. He was "totally focused on the puck," he said. "The rest of it I take it by the sound. I know the voices of all my teammates. I filter out all other sounds and forget what the fans are yelling. You have to be focused on the puck every time you step on the ice."

As the minutes flashed by on the scoreboard, Alex skated ever closer to an unlucky seven games with no goals. The Carolina Hurricanes, the defending Stanley Cup champions, dominated the first half. The Capitals' newest Russian player, Alexander Semin, looked to be the lone hometown hero of the evening, scoring one goal every period.

When Alex still hadn't scored by the beginning of the third period, he told himself: Don't worry. It didn't matter if he scored personally. All that mattered was the Capitals winning.

"To me hockey is less like theater and more like war," Alex said. "You come out five soldiers against five enemy soldiers. You are trying to defeat them and take what they think is theirs."

Sitting high above the rink, Alex's mother watched her son intently. She had stopped worrying sometime in the second period, she later recalled. "I could feel it," she said. "There was some kind of mental connection between us. I could see him gradually getting into the flow of the game. I could see his movements change. I could see his mind-set change. I could really feel what he feels. I'm sure he could feel what I felt. I know him through and through. I know every one of his moves. I know every one of the little things he does on ice. I always know what it leads up to, and whether it's going to be successful or not successful. I knew everything was going to be fine."

Mom was right. Alex could sense his mother watching him, he later said. "I feel that she wants to help me," he recalled. "She does help me when she is in the stands because she is my mom. My dad helps me, too. I play for them."

Alex exploded in the third period, vanquishing the specter of the sophomore slump as if it were an opposing player. He scored twice, helping lead the Caps to a 5-2 victory. He made 15 shots on goal that night, a career record for him. Over the next 12 games, he scored eight goals and assisted on eight more, besting his record for the same period last season. Each time he scored, he blew a kiss heavenward. The kisses, he said, were for his late brother, Sergei.

After the cheering stopped the night that the rookie of the year got his skating groove back, Alex, his girlfriend, parents and brother headed for the big brick house that hockey bought. The family didn't waste time chatting about endorsement deals or what the sports reporters asked afterward in the locker room. The parents didn't heap their son with foolish praise. They analyzed the game.

Then, as Alex drifted off to sleep in his king-size bed in the master bedroom with the walk-in closet full of Dolce & Gabbana clothing, he dreamed hockey.

Just as he did as a small boy in Moscow, Alex dreams often that he is pursuing the puck. Only now, he said, after all these years of struggle and determination, he also dreams of holding proof that he has tested himself against the worthiest foes in the world and prevailed. He dreams that the Washington Capitals win the Stanley Cup.

"It's not a recurring dream," he said. "My dreams are never exactly the same from night to night. But the Stanley Cup is there quite often." Winning the cup is never easy, not even in his dreams. "It's a difficult fight," he said. "We are always behind in the series. We struggle. We win in overtime. It is never easy. But we win in the end."

The young man's dreams are so intensely vivid that "it's to the point where I can feel the cup," he said. "I can feel touching it, raising it above my head."

April Witt is a staff writer for the Magazine. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon , along with Slava Malamud, who covers the NHL for the Russian-language Sports-Express Daily.