(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers who hated them the most. Here is Puck Daddy’s own Ryan Lambert, fondly recalling the Washington Capitals. Again: This is a roast and you will be offended by it, so don't take it so seriously.)

We are gathered here today to mourn not only the loss of the Washington Capitals, but also the loss of their chances of reasonably competing for a Stanley Cup any time in even the relatively near future.

You tend to hear a lot of talk about how one team or another has a "window" in which they can reasonably win the Stanley Cup. San Jose, for example, has had its window open and close so many times — by the media's reckoning — that Doug Wilson finally installed a revolving door to save on energy.

Another team for whom we hear entirely too much about their "window" is the Washington Capitals.

But the thing about that is if it was open at all any more (and frankly, it probably wasn't), it was open in the way that smokers crack their window on the highway, and that horrible high-pitched sound of wind rushing in so loud that you can't hear the radio any more was the voice of a thousand Alex Ovechkin apologists who wanted nothing more than for that incredible back half of the season to once again be reality, rather than outlier.

Just as death is inevitable, so too was this result; the kind of slow, heavy train you could feel coming miles away if you touched your hand to the track, its whistle a deep and mournful cry carried to you by the wind.

Of course the Capitals were going to trip in the first round. It couldn't happen any other way. Because, with the Capitals goes the Southeast Division, and nothing in the history of hockey has ever been more fitting than the last-ever champion of the worst division in the history of professional sports than losing at home to a six-seed that finished the regular season with one fewer point.

This is a team that finished with as many points as the Toronto Maple Leafs, and we're supposed to sit here and act as though they were somehow resurgent now.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this team used to win Presidents' Trophies? And now it's relegated to barely squeaking through on the … well, I was going to say strength, but that's obviously not the right word… on the back of the fifth-weakest schedule in the league this season.

The Caps finished the year with 27 regular-season wins, mostly because the NHL FedEx'd their schedule to reporters and celebrities all over the country before the playoffs started, and in the end lost in the playoffs to a team from an actual decent division — not even a very good one — because they couldn't win one (1) game on the road.

It's amazing to think how such a thing could happen. Certainly, it can't have too much to do the fact that their coach, who only took until about halfway through the season that it might be a good idea to put Ovechkin on a line with someone other than Jay Beagle, was going up against a guy who should have way more than one Jack Adams, can it?

(Somewhere, Bruce Boudreau is eating $57 worth of McDonald's and mumbling, "Not so [expletive]in' easy, is it?")

If you're looking for people to blame for this team's thankfully quick and relatively painless death, you might wanna start with Alex Vechkin and Mike Ribier, who unfortunately forgot to bring the 'O' along for this postseason.

It seems that when teams like the Florida Panthers (six goals scored), and Winnipeg Jets (four) and Tampa Bay Lightning and Carolina Hurricanes (three each) aren't on the schedule, it really is pretty tough to score in the National Hockey League when you're 27 years old, declining despite all appearances to the contrary this season, and have about three moves that actual NHL-caliber defenses long ago learned to stop.

Just a single goal in seven games, that on the power play, that in Game 1. One may shoot and shoot and be ineffectual, at least I am sure it may be so in Washington. Adam Oates is just left standing there with the unattached leash in his hand, saying, "Well hey I tried."

You have to wonder how many people among the mourners here today were those who said the magic of his regular season was real, and who excoriated those who brought up the inconvenient fact of against whom they were coming, and what it all probably meant in the end. It got Washington into the playoffs, and just barely saved it the indignity of finishing with fewer points than the ninth-place team.

Story continues