Things falling into place for Caps

There is optimism in the Washington Capitals’ dressing room, lots of it. But it is being handled very carefully, ladled out in small doses.

Nobody wants to get too excited too quickly.

“Hey, they’re not sizing us up for [championship] rings yet,” said goalie Olie Kolzig, reining in thoughts about where all this might lead. “We can’t get ahead of ourselves. What we’re going through now we went through in the exact opposite way 10 days ago. It can all change very quickly.”

Leave it to Kolzig, the elder statesman, to call for a reality check. It was only Nov. 28 that the Caps snapped a six-game winless streak wherein the team scored just nine goals. It has now won four straight, scoring 22.

Now after four straight wins, the team is barely on the horizon in the tightly bunched Eastern Conference, ranked 10th out of 15 before last night. Washington has 30 points and is clawing forward. Last season after 27 games it had just 20 points and the disappointing end was clearly visible.

But this is where most of the Caps expected to be right now, if not a little higher. Last season, the first in the rebuilding program, there wasn’t a realistic chance of making the postseason. This season it’s on the calendar.

“The toughest part of the process was realizing it was going to take time, knowing it wasn’t going to happen overnight,” said Kolzig, the only player left from the 1998 run to the Stanley Cup Finals. “You want to win right away so it’s frustrating when you don’t. But optimism was growing with each game, you could see that eventually this was going to turn into something special. We have a long way to go; we’re not going to get wrapped up just by winning four straight.”

The night that changed everything was Oct. 22, 2005, after the Caps, who won only three of their first nine games, were shut out by Carolina. Coach Glen Hanlon and his staff — as well as the players — knew something was wrong and it had to be fixed.

“The system we were playing was designed before all the rule changes,” he said. “They changed the rules and took away the red line. After nine games we knew [the system] wasn’t working so we installed a system that was all about hard work, and it works.”

“When you don’t have guys working hard, competing, you get depressed,” said Chris Clark, the team captain. “Now our guys are always working. We went six games without winning but we had [two] overtimes so we knew we were in games. We always believe there’s a chance of winning.”

The differences between last season, when the Caps counted mostly on Alex Ovechkin, and this year are readily apparent, Clark said.

“You can’t always count on Olie to bail us out or Ovechkin or [Dainius] Zubrus,” he said. “That’s why the other night [a 6-2 win over Ottawa] was so important. We had five different guys score, not just one or two. That way the other teams can’t concentrate on just one line. We had four lines contributing and it … ah … playoff teams have four lines, all of them working hard and contributing.”