The conversation ends abruptly. Ovechkin's dangerous-looking friend Magomet, whom Alex has been texting throughout our talk (he texts nonstop, with prodigious -smileys), has rolled up in an Audi SUV painted a scabrous matte black. For a while, we cruise down Tverskaya. Each time he sees a pretty girl walking by, Ovechkin shouts "BOOM!" at the top of his lungs.

Between the explosions, we decide on our next outing. Once again, the place is Ovechkin's idea: a skating rink. I've never skated in my life.

"I've never skated in my life," I say.

"Great," says Ovechkin. "So we'll all laugh at you."

"Great."

"BOOM!"

···

As the Caps' season nears, Ovechkin finds himself in a unique situation. For all his undisputed genius, he has yet to lead the Capitals to the Stanley Cup or Russia to Olympic gold. He'll tell anyone who'll listen that these are his twin goals in life, and so far he's fallen short on both. The humility is not false. It is learned; there's a difference. In 2009 the Capitals fell to his former idols, the Crosby-led Penguins; this April, with Ovechkin as the captain and everybody's hopes sky-high, the Capitals shockingly squandered a 3–1 playoff lead to the Montreal Canadiens. Ovechkin was crushed. "You know, it's hard for me, but for everybody," he mumbled to the press after the defeat, his shaky English halfway out the window. "We know we can win, but we don't win it. It's pretty hard."

In Ovechkin's life, the Cup is what English professors call a structuring absence. So far he's only won it playing NHL2K10, the video game whose cover he graces in all his gap-toothed glory. Ovechkin is masochistically prone to steering the conversation back to it from anywhere. When the Caps owner Ted Leonsis asked him what he thought of his Hart and Pearson awards (both essentially MVPs), Ovechkin immediately said he would "trade them all for one Stanley Cup." When I mention his feud with a fellow Russian and former roommate, Evgeni Malkin of the Penguins, Ovechkin visibly deflates and says he considers Malkin the winner: "He's got the Stanley Cup, and I don't."

The fate of the Caps depends on whether Ovechkin's palpable hunger will take them farther this season than it did before. Ovechkin himself knows better than to make any promises. "He's still pissed [about 2009]," says Bruce Boudreau, the Capitals' head coach. "He's going to have an extra chip on his shoulder. And he's getting better every year—he is still on the upswing."

Russia, meanwhile, appears patient with her son: The 2008 World Championship he helped win will tide the fans over for a while. On the horizon, however, looms Sochi 2014, Russia's second home-turf Olympics and the first since the fall of the USSR. At the last Russian Olympics, the Americans and Canadians stayed home—and Ovechkin's mother snagged the gold. Knowing Ovechkin even a little bit, the way his brilliance is laced with moodiness, it's not hard to imagine his reaction to anything less than gold in Sochi. It would destroy him.

So far, however, Russia is still his candy store. Next day, we meet at Evropeisky ("European"), a mega-mall complete with an enormous food court, ravelike lighting, and a bank of elevators made to look like golden-domed Orthodox churches that slide up and down. The rink, poignantly, shares the top floor with Barbie's World and Build-a-Bear Workshop.

Ovie can't help himself. He shows up with two very young telochki, Lera and Olesya, that he's picked up at Soho Rooms. They're dressed like snow bunnies and have clearly had at least some skating classes between them. A stray thought visits me that Ovie has brought one of them to keep me company, but before I can figure out which one, it becomes rather obvious he's planning to keep both. Dressed in all white, complete with a white cap, he whooshes down the slushy ice—spraying a frozen margarita's worth on each dramatic stop—twirls, parodies figure-skating moves (impressively), snaps souvenir photos, rolls video, and takes turns making out with Lera while Olesya documents the proceedings and making out with Olesya while Lera does the documenting. While the calves and the lamb cavort, I hug the boards for an hour and a half. The girls giggle. The whole tableau is a high school nightmare come to life. Finally deliverance arrives in the form of a crone entrusted with the task of closing down the rink for the night. She doesn't recognize the hockey star and rudely shoos Ovechkin away, and it's fun to watch him go totally meek when faced with the fury of a Russian babushka.

"So, did you understand anything about skating?" Ovie prods me in the locker room, unlacing his rented skates.

"I understand that I can't do it for shit."

Ovechkin gives me a look of genuine pity. It only lasts a split second. Then, Lera and Olesya hanging off his biceps, he leaves "to grab some food." There are forty-five days left until the 2010 season, and from the looks of things, he's going to spend them well.

This is probably not the most obvious moment to pity Ovechkin back. Yet it's not easy to be where he is: in the gap between star and legend. All the perks are his (the next time I call him, he's midshoot on a Reebok commercial), but true glory is proving slippery. No matter how materialistic this post-Soviet boy comes across, he has signed up for more than this. And so have the fans. Ovechkin's massive fame is still a kind of loan, and it matures soon. This year better be legendary. This year better boom.

Michael Idov is a contributing editor at_New York magazine and the author of the novel Ground Up. This is his first piece for _GQ.