STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, CAPITALS BOTTOM OUT

Washington Capitals defenseman John Carlson skated behind his own net, collected the puck and looked up-ice at the canvas in front of him. 2011–12 had been rough through 62 games — the Capitals were in a playoff berth dogfight in the tightly packed Eastern Conference. They'd been hit with several key injuries and had even experienced a mid-season coaching change. The fact that their postseason hopes were still in question was unusual for a team that had enjoyed tremendous regular-season success in recent years, winning the Presidents' Trophy in 2009–10 and having been the East's top seed two years running.

Even though players were glancing at the out-of-town scoreboard, they knew only one score really mattered: the one on the high-definition screen that hung over center ice. Right now it showed the Capitals trailing the New York Islanders by two with less than four minutes remaining in regulation. Despite their struggles, the Caps still owned one of the league's best home records, but they'd been frustrated by Islanders goaltender Evgeni Nabokov. The sellout crowd of 18,506 was looking for a reason to cheer when Carlson decided to skate out from behind the cage toward his right and delivered a long pass to Jason Chimera at center. The winger tipped the pass into the corner of the Isles' zone, outraced a pair of defensemen and chipped the puck back to Mathieu Perreault. The center took the feed and sent it across the goal line to Troy Brouwer, who was parked just at the far side of the blue paint and tipped the puck past Nabokov with 3:29 to play.

The crowd roared its approval, with the fans — and the players — sensing that perhaps a Washington comeback was possible. While the Capitals buzzed as the clock wound down under a minute, the crowd tried to do its part, rising during a timeout taken with 31.8 seconds left in regulation by Capitals legend-turned-coach Dale Hunter. Tonight's game was Washington's 136th consecutive sellout — three years had passed since a Capitals home game had had any empty seats, and that crowd also had gained a reputation around the league as one of the loudest in the NHL. Washington fans created an impressive visual display: a majority of them wore the team's signature red sweater.

The ensuing draw was in the Islanders' end. Washington center Jeff Halpern — who grew up a Capitals fan, just a few miles away from the city limits in Potomac, Maryland — was able to send the puck back to winger Brooks Laich. The veteran forward ran a quick give and go with defenseman Dennis Wideman. After Laich took the return pass, he wound up and fired through traffic in front of the net. The shot grazed off Troy Brouwer's stick and in past Nabokov, sending the crowd into a frenzy with just 25.5 seconds left in regulation. The six players on the ice mobbed Laich, and the team's superstar captain, Alexander Ovechkin, pumped his fist.

With the two-goal deficit erased, all that was left was a player to complete the storybook ending.

Early in overtime the Islanders broke into the Capitals' zone, but defenseman Mike Green poke-checked the puck free to Ovechkin. The top pick of the 2004 NHL draft picked up the disk and gained steam along the boards; Islanders defenseman Travis Hamonic skated backward, looking to defend. Once Ovechkin reached the faceoff circle in the New York zone, he fired a wrist shot. The puck whistled by Hamonic's skate and through Nabokov's pads. The goalie could only tilt his head back and look toward the building's rafters; Ovechkin skated to the corner and the entire Capitals roster mobbed their captain. The fans pounded on the glass in celebration behind them.

The overtime win eventually led to celebratory dance music in the Capitals' locker room, and a large media contingent entered and surrounded the Russian at his corner locker. In the other corner, Brouwer, still wearing all his gear, also answered questions in front of a mob of cameras and recorders. He talked about the two goals he'd scored, but made a point of explaining that the fans fueled the comeback. "We could feel the positive energy in the building, and it's so much more fun to play at home," he said.

Dale Hunter spoke to the media in a crowded room underneath the stands — and the local journalists would use his words to backbone their improbable comeback stories. It's a tale local hockey fans have read time and time again — ever since the seemingly down-and-out franchise underwent the transformation that made it one of the league's most visible and successful.

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Back when the 2003–04 regular season was drawing to a close, labor woes began to spread the dark shadow of pending doom over the NHL's member cities. Washington, however, was a gloomy place even before the Capitals' painful 82-game campaign of disintegration mercifully made its way into late March.

The very real threat of an extended work stoppage put the entire 2004–05 season in jeopardy. The game's economic landscape looked destined for a major overhaul, with the league's owners determined to install a hard cap to control player salaries. Sensing what was on the horizon, the Capitals' management took a gamble with both the team's fan base and its roster by electing to try to completely overhaul the team as the season wore on.

The Capitals shed most of their expensive veteran salaries, trading the team's popular stars for prospects and draft picks in an effort to get a jump on a new economic system — one that was still to be determined by a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that was months away from being hammered out in the bitter and protracted negotiations between the NHL and the National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA).

The result of a season's worth of dumping players and their pricey contracts — not to mention the fact that some of the remaining players weren't thrilled to be part of the kind of rebuilding project not seen in America's capital since the NHL franchise first arrived in 1974 — led to the Capitals and their fans suffering through the worst season in decades, and the team nearing its lowest point in the team's 30-year history.

On March 30, 2004, with less than a week to go in the regular season, the purple-hued scoreboard at then–MCI Center hanging above center ice featured the names of familiar rivals: Capitals and Penguins, a showdown that would normally attract a sellout crowd. The former Patrick Division foes had fought through seven bitter playoff series the previous dozen years and produced some of the most memorable moments in the two teams' histories — legacies that had become entwined since the Penguins beat the Caps en route to their first Stanley Cup title in the spring of 1991.

On this night, however, the team names and uniforms were pretty much the only common threads between the players on the ice and the two teams' successful pasts as they skated at the seven-year-old arena in Washington's Chinatown neighborhood, battling to stay out of the league's basement. The sounds of blades cutting into the ice and the players' chatter was clearly audible thanks to the rather small number of souls in attendance.

While the Capitals were no strangers to the playoffs in their previous 21 seasons — missing the cut just three times between the 1982–83 and 2002–03 seasons — the only postseason...