from Dan Steinberg of D.C. Sports Bog,

Washingtonians will never earn the national sympathy so easily given to Cleveland or Chicago, but there’s a pathos in rooting for this hockey team. There are the 10 times the Caps have lost two-game series leads. The two Presidents’ Trophy thrill-rides that both ended in postseason ditches. The litany of Game 7 horrors. Match all that with the 25 years since the Redskins won a Super Bowl, and … well, here’s Sportsnet’s Sean McIndoe, explaining why unaffiliated fans should now cheer for the Caps: “This team has been over a decade in the making,” he wrote. “Their fans deserve to see them win.”

So will they finally do it? Eh, probably not. In the NHL’s absurdist coin-flippity postseason, oddsmakers would certainly make the Caps a major underdog to win it all. And you won’t convince me the past is completely irrelevant until Ovechkin is marching past the Trump International.

But that’s a different question from whether they’ve done just about everything right for two years, and whether they deserve to finish that process with a Cup. They have. And they do.

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