Written by Dan Steinberg at WashingtonPost.com
I don’t do many sports-radio interviews. Maybe it’s because people don’t like my voice, or maybe it’s because I don’t have much to say, or maybe it’s because I’m too busy transcribing other peoples’ rants, but I’ve never been a popular sports-radio guest.
This week, though, I’ve been asked to do a whole bunch of sports-radio interviews, maybe more than I’ve ever been asked to do in a single week. Turns out lots of national shows wanted to know what Washingtonians were thinking about their hockey team, which had dominated the regular season and then lost, yet again, in the playoffs.
It’s one thing to type out a few paragraphs about how there is so much randomness in playoff hockey, and how the Capitals were out-scored by one goal over six second-round games — three of which ended in overtime — and how that doesn’t really invalidate those five months when the Capitals won more games than any other NHL team and more than any hockey team in D.C. history. But that sounds kinda funny when you’re talking to national hosts asking about spring failure. So I was pretty depressive on these sports radio interviews, I think. I said it’s sure gonna be hard for people here to get excited about another hockey regular season next fall. What the heck is the point of five months of excellence, if there’s no parade at the end?
I wrote much the same thing from the backseat of a rental car on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, while the two people in the front seat discussed Virginia Tech basketball: that people here will be awfully skeptical when the Caps return in October, because what’s the point? We know the ending.
Then I got home, picked up my wife and daughter and went straight to Nats Park, where we secured three Bryce Harper bobbleheads, two perfect veggie dogs, one cup of Dippin Dots, and left in the fifth inning. School night, and all. We got home in time to watch Max Scherzer equal an MLB record with 20 strikeouts. It was the sort of performance that had 35,000 fans on their feet, grown men celebrating like children, fans at home rejoicing with online pals they’ve never met, and a lot of people feeling happy on a night they otherwise might have spent, say, cleaning the bathroom, or responding to work emails.
