As the clock ticked down in T-Mobile Arena, anxious Capitals players and fans alike hanging on every second, something very Caps-ian happened.
With less than two minutes remaining, time stopped. No, not in the cliche sense, but literally a clock malfunction that left everyone guessing how close the Capitals were to winning their first Stanley Cup in franchise history and the city's first championship in nearly three decades.
But when time started moving again, and eventually the clock hit zero, no one, no one was happier than Alex Ovechkin, and for good reason.
Pure, raw Ovechkin emotion pic.twitter.com/DEWUI3WTFV
— Evan Sporer (@ev_sporer) June 8, 2018
For the past eight weeks, Ovechkin has taken fans on this emotional rollercoaster with him. He's laughed, cried, buried his head in anxious moments, and screamed with joy in times of success.
Perhaps no athlete in his generation has been unfairly scrutinized more than Alex Ovechkin. To many, this first Stanley Cup will help shape Ovechkin's legacy, this missing chapter in a Hall of Fame story. How much this meant to Ovechkin could be seen in these moments, years of frustration slowly seeping out of his pores, the weight of a city and country slowly being chipped off his back.
In reality, Ovechkin is who he was eight weeks ago, and eight months ago, and even eight years ago.
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But this Stanley Cup -- through necessity or nonnecessity -- will entirely change the conversation surrounding Ovechkin. And if that's one of the byproducts, great, because Ovechkin is due the utmost respect and adulation, praise reserved for the best players to ever play the game of hockey, because that's what Ovechkin is: one of the best to ever do it.
And now, it feels like the final layer has finally been peeled back, the only remaining demerit on Ovechkin, if you so chose to try to marginalize the career achievements of one of hockey's greatest stars.
Alex Ovechkin: Stanley Cup winner, Conn Smythe winner, first Russian-born captain ever to lead his team to a championship, and a vindicated star with perhaps nothing else left to prove, only to chase records and continue to be one of the most entertaining athletes of his generation.
For years, the knock on Ovechkin was that he couldn't win. Not with Russia, not in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and certainly not a championship. It helped stitch narratives that Ovechkin as a leader was subpar. As a Russian, he didn't try hard enough, or play the game the right way. When he scored goals at a historic pace, he was derided for not being good enough defensively. When he tried to become a better defensively player, he didn't score enough. When he emoted, he was a distraction or a poor role model. In every sense, he simply couldn't win.
And then entirely unexpectedly, this Capitals team, the one that lost both Kevin Shattenkirk and Marcus Johansson last summer, got one of Braden Holtby's worst professional seasons, and finished 13 points behind the team's 2016-17 pace and 15 points behind 2015-16 did what its predecessors could not.
Yes, Ovechkin had so much to do with that, his fingerprints all over this iteration of Caps even before he was the first on the team to lift the Stanley Cup, but there's an incongruity to universally associating the two together. But that's not how history will remember Ovechkin in this important chapter.
For every goal Ovechkin scored in this postseason (and there were many; he set a Capitals postseason record with 15 in this run) those singing Ovechkin's praises got a little louder. This would be the year, they said, Ovechkin playing the best he ever has past the regular season, his leadership being taken to a new level that would finally put Washington over the top. (Seriously, could you even count on two hands how many times Ovechkin was asked about his leadership?)
But in reality, the type of production and performance he put in mirrored what Ovechkin had done in the playoffs for years. Again, winning helps to shine things in a kinder light.
Perhaps the biggest, tangible difference in this playoff run was the defensive style the Capitals played and the success they had in doing so. The offensive players were at their very best, Ovechkin and Evgeny Kuznetsov and Nicklas Backstrom included, but that was nothing new for Washington. Underneath that, Washington finally played a balanced enough game, and got the necessary bounces, to get over humps that previously stumped them.
But at every step, one could observe how much that meant to Ovechkin, and the basic understanding he had of what this all meant not only to his franchise, and not only to his city, but himself.
"It means everything," Ovechkin said on the ice in the moments after Washington won. "It was a tough time, but we fight through it and we get results. I'm going home to our families, our fans and it's just something special, you know. I don't know, I'm just very excited and I'm very happy right now."
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The reality of being Alex Ovechkin meant universally being held responsible for the successes and the failures of the franchise.
"There were a lot of series where maybe Washington got eliminated but he had great series," said Capitals defenseman Brooks Orpik, who for nine seasons played against Ovechkin as a member of the Pittsburgh Penguins, including one playoff series in 2009, a 4-3 Capitals loss in the second round. "He probably took the brunt of the criticism just because he’s the captain and the highest-paid guy.
"A lot of guys feel for him in that situation. If you watched the reaction of his teammates when he got the Cup, it speaks volumes about how guys feel about him. He’s a very unique captain; you’ll probably never find another guy like him. He leads in a very unique way. But he definitely pulls guys into the fight."
And it wasn't only his teammates who found it easy to root for Ovechkin. Because when the cameras captured him in vulnerable moments, when Ovechkin showed his humanity, you felt for him. When he sprinted off the bench and into the pile of Capitals players behind Braden Holtby's goal, your heart raced there with him. And when he wore that expression on his face — you know the one — of finally achieving what so many said he could never do, you couldn't help but cry with him.
"It was like we were a bunch of 10 year olds that just won their first hockey tournament," said Matt Niskanen, who Ovechkin hugged behind the goal in those first celebratory moments. "It was like we were a bunch of little kids again. Amazing. Amazing."
In the seconds before the buzzer finally groaned, time didn't physically stop, but became more of a construct than a reality. From his position on the bench Ovechkin could only look up and wonder how many moments were left, how long he had to wait to exorcise that last demon.
After the puck was dropped for a defensive-zone faceoff with 109 seconds remaining, the clock didn't move. Three seconds later, it jumped back to 15:19, and then four seconds later, down to 14.9, until the clock was altogether stripped away.
Ovechkin was left to think about the past 13 years, his entire career, to win something some said he never would be able to.
"It's just like a dream," he said.
Only this time, it really did happen.