WASHINGTON — It ended with a tangle of bodies on the ice, the final death rattle of a hockey season, Islanders and Capitals reduced to the basic, visceral law of competition: Leave it all on the ice. Literally. Your sweat. Your blood. Your helmet. Your stick. Everything.
It ended with one final roar from a Verizon Center crowd that spent so much of the night waiting for the historical shoe to drop, all those Game 7s across all the years, so many disappointments, so many times the Caps sent these folks home with long faces and broken hearts.