Old Acquaintances Who Won't Forget

Ovie showed up first, sometime after 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, eager to see his friends in a social gathering for the final time before they scattered to different ends of the globe for the summer. Varly was there at 4 p.m. sharp, someone remembered.

Soon every member of the team trickled into Tony and Joe's Seafood Place on the Georgetown waterfront, including the dozen or so Washington Capitals who went over to Brooks Laich's house in Arlington earlier in the day, and Game 7 conversation was usurped by, "Should I expand the deck or not?"

Like kids with a secret code to get into the treehouse, they called each other by their nicknames: "Brooksie" and "Feds" and "Gordo" and "Flash," followed by "Clarkie," "Greenie," "Stecks" and the rest.

No coaches. No team officials, just players and trainers -- just one more night to cement the bond.

They threw back light and dark lagers and other libations, ordered some food and looked out over the Potomac River and toward the Kennedy Center. Later they walked across K Street to Maté, where they devoured sushi, gigantic plates of raw salmon, fatty tuna and seaweed-wrapped rolls of rice and teriyaki-glazed eel.

Eight hours of camaraderie, fall-down laughter (via an end-of-the-year video featuring Matt Bradley pitching face-first onto the ice) and, of course, some can't-believe-it's-over regret.

"Everybody [ticked] off, last night especially when you saw all of your teammates," Alex Ovechkin said. "We talk about, 'How we can lose?' It was very hard.''

Before the NHL's reigning MVP slung two stuffed duffel bags over each shoulder yesterday afternoon at the team's training facility in Ballston and said, "Bye guys," as he scurried to make a 4 p.m. flight to Moscow, Ovie and his teammates made time for each other about a month earlier than they wanted to, hoisting glasses but no Cup.

"We weren't really ready for it to end," Eric Fehr said, describing the mood of the evening. "When it was over, we still didn't believe it. It felt like we had to go to the rink the next day and everything was going to be back to normal and we're going to start Round 3. That's how everybody felt, like this season hadn't quite ended yet."

None of them knew whether they would see Sergei Fedorov, Donald Brashear or Viktor Kozlov on their team again, though they campaigned hard for the team's free agents, especially the legendary "Feds" and the most rugged of them all, "Brash," whom Ovechkin called "a bodyguard."

"He could be looking at you from the bench and it calms everything down," Chris Clark said of the league's most respected enforcer. "You can bring in someone that will fight 30 times a year, but does he have what Brash has? We didn't have him my first year here and it was a big difference, with guys not taking liberties -- especially with the best player in the world."

Much is made of the language barrier between the two Russians who barely speak English and their Canadian and American teammates. But there was Alexander Semin after Game 6, smiling broadly in a corridor of Mellon Arena in Pittsburgh, catching David Steckel's eye after he scored the game-winning goal. "Stecks!" he said, continuing to smile.

It went a lot like that Thursday, the day after their deflating 6-2 loss on home ice to Pittsburgh in the deciding game of the second-round Stanley Cup playoff series.

"We were looking back on the season, having some pretty good laughs with a lot of the guys, funny stuff," Laich said.

Explaining why his brother visiting from Canada loves raw fish, he added: "We don't have sushi in Saskatchewan. We have steak and hamburgers and deer sausage. That's all he eats."

Bradley has forever earned the moniker "Toe Pick," from the cheesy 1992 D.B. Sweeney movie "The Cutting Edge" because, according to Laich and others, "Brads always toe picks and falls on his face."

Fehr got ribbed for being yelled at mercilessly by coaches. In the roasting department, almost no one left unscathed.

Recriminations would come another day. Roster moves were for later. Whether Clark would consider giving up his captainship -- "I would do it if they asked but it means so much to me they'd probably have to tear it out of my hands," he said. Whether the big life of an NHL star defenseman got to the small Canadian hamlet inside of Mike Green, that was for another day as well.

The night after their season ended, all the men who raised their sticks to the crowd who had given them a standing ovation at Verizon Center for that record 108-point season and two palpitating, down-to-the-last-game series spent their final night together.

When the mass text was sent out by Laich -- "Come to my house first or else we'll meet you at the waterfront" -- all the Capitals eventually responded and met up. After eight hours in Georgetown together, they went their separate ways after midnight. Some set out for Josephine or Tattoo or other clubs and destinations unknown. Some went home.

"It's sad to be leaving these guys," Laich said. "Our guys are so tight-knit. It's why we have so much fun on the ice and we're very successful. Because our players thoroughly enjoy each other."

He added the best part about the sport is "the friendships you make with the guys and hanging out with them."

Said the teammate and friend they all called "Brooksie" on Thursday night, "There's hockey and there's also life."