Before last night’s game I realized that the warmup music they were playing was what they used to play back in the go-go days 2009. Through Twitter, Jordan Greenberg (the guy that plays the music), told me they’ve been playing it all along. If this is true, I must be getting older and forgetting stuff. Hope I remember that can be a useful skill.

The game itself against the New York Islanders went through a number of phases. The phase where the Capitals were pretty much dominating, winning every battle for every puck, getting off lots of shots and giving up almost none, yet managing to end the period not he wrong end of of an 0-1 score. Second period was kind of the same…still winning almost all the battles, but it took eight minutes or so for the Capitals to register their first shot of the period. Um. In the third period, it felt a little bit like the game in Carolina last week.

Then the Islanders went up by another goal. A few more minutes passed and some fans started heading for the exits when Matt Hendricks took a penalty with about 7 minutes left. After that, though, the earth spun backwards and everything was right again. Troy Brouwer scored twice in the final few minutes to tie the game at two and I saw something I hadn’t seen at Verizon Center in quite a while…The fans didn’t sit back down after Brouwer’s first goal. The ones that were left. Or, at least, a bunch of them.

Overtime. Does anyone remember a game a year ago almost to the day? When Alex Ovechkin just couldn’t pretend he’s not a total, bitchin’ rock star from Mars and rolled out the magic in overtime against the Islanders? Well, it was kinda like that, but different. The result was right.

To read more better stuff, check out On Frozen Blog, Ed Frankovic, Japer’s Rink, Russian Machine, Capitals Outsider and District Sports Page.

You can see my photos below and on flickr, but I highly recommend Tom Turk’s photos, too. Really great stuff! Russian Machine has a nice little collection worth looking at as well.