Published: May 13, 2009 12:15 am      

You almost hate to cash this one in

If I were approaching tonight’s NHL Eastern Conference semifinal Game 7 with the attitude that my entire evening will be ruined if a certain team doesn’t win, I would say the Capitals would be the team I would be rooting for.

I used to live about 15 minutes from the Capital Centre back in the day, and when it wasn’t baseball season I would take in several Bullets and Caps games to get myself through those horrible winter months. So there is kind of a D.C.-is-a-transient-area connection there for me.

The other reason would probably involve Cumberland cable television provider Atlantic Broadband, which in March of 2008 took Comcast SportsNet Mid-Atlantic out of Bethesda off of its programming dial, meaning you still get nothing but fuzz whenever you turn to channel 37 to see if our cable provider ever got around to “(improving) the variety and the diversity of sports programming in the Cumberland area,” as David Dane, vice president and general manager of Atlantic Broadband, said would occur 15 months ago.

(The MLB Network, anybody?)

While the Orioles and the Nationals games are televised by MASN (which, thankfully, Atlantic Broadband picked up immediately after the network’s inception), I pointed out to Dane that not only would Cumberland sports fans be deprived of Comcast’s coverage of the University of Maryland, Georgetown, Redskins and Ravens, but live NBA and NHL games involving the Wizards and the Caps.

Dane, who is based in Pennsylvania, said he was a hockey fan himself, and that Cumberland area hockey fans would still have hockey in the form of the Penguins games on Fox Sports-Pittsburgh, prompting my friend Ed, who is a Caps fan, to say “Sure, I like the concept of the puck going in the net. I don’t care what team does it.”

The Penguins, you see, are to Caps fans what the Yankees and the Red Sox are to Orioles fans: a royal boil on the arse in general, but particularly when they are in your town and home arena.

Penguins fans have long called the Cap Centre and now Verizon Center their home away from home, because whenever the Pens are in D.C. as much as 40 percent of the Caps’ home arena is filled by Penguins fans. D.C. sports fans are indifferent in general (see transient area), unless something constitutes a big event (see Redskins home games). They like to get all Suited up and be seen as being influential and wealthy (see Camden Yards before O’s collapse and Nats birth), so I doubt that will be the case tonight at Verizon Center for such a dynamic Game 7, although you can be assured there will be Pens fans there.

But this magnificent series, even to luke-warm hockey fans such as myself, has lived up to its anticipation and hype. For not only do you have a heated rivalry between two longtime Eastern Conference franchises and cities, you have the three best hockey players in the world on the ice at any given time in the Caps’ Alex Ovechkin and the Pens’ Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin; and all three have not only produced to their reputations, they’ve exceeded them, with a ton of help coming from both teams’ supporting casts.

Just as the Bird vs. Magic NBA Finals lived up to their expectations, this Ovechkin vs. Crosby conference semifinal final has done so and more, with each of the first six games being the stuff that could one day be the saving grace of hockey, if only the series were available to more than the 66 percent of the cable viewers in the country that the Versus Network reaches.

Seamheads such as myself, however, would be even more naive about hockey than we already are if we allowed ourselves to believe this level of hockey is produced nightly by every team in the league. Yet as sports fans, we realize the brilliance of something such as this series when we see it, even if it takes place through a sport we have not lived and died with as we have baseball, football, as well as college basketball.

The NBA, the cousin of the NHL, got very lucky with the wonderful seven-game series between the Celtics and the Bulls, but the NHL has hit the mother lode with Caps-Penguins/Ovechkin-Crosby. The only shame is it’s not being played for the Stanley Cup. The beauty of that, however, is it is likely to occur a lot more often along the road to the NHL final than Celtics-Lakers/Bird-Magic ever occurred in the NBA final.

You take small victories when they find you, and often times you are rewarded with a winning lottery ticket you didn’t even realize you had in your wallet.

With either the Caps or the Penguins moving on and the other one closing it down for the season tonight, it’s going to be rather sad not to be carrying that lottery ticket around a while longer.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Write to him at mburke@times-news.com