Chris McCallum is pretty sure the guys at Firehall 19 — “City of Calgary. Greatest job in the world!” — are not going to believe this.

Ted Leonsis has just invited him to grab a beer, take a seat, settle in, assume the mantle of NHL team owner for a period. To which firefighter McCallum, draped in a generous cherry red Alex Ovechkin jersey and a smile that could swallow all of D.C., can barely bring himself to respond, “Oh my god!”

This is not a reality show.

You have to know that back in the winter of 2004 McCallum fired off an email to the Washington Capitals owner, unhappy — that’s putting it mildly — that the Caps had traded Peter Bondra to the Ottawa Senators. Bondra was in tears and maybe McCallum shed a tear. He sure felt awful and figured he needed to share that — “share” is putting it mildly — with the team’s proprietor.

Leonsis wrote back, though McCallum says he did wonder initially whether it was truly the multimillionaire at the keyboard. Leonsis posed this question in his two-paragraph-long reply: Didn’t Bondra deserve a chance at the Stanley Cup? The then-whiffing Caps sure couldn’t offer Bondra that. The Cup, that is. (Nor could the Senators, as it turned out.) So McCallum, assuaged, made up with the team he adores, a moment that can be carbon dated to 1980 when Maple Leafs goalie Mike Palmateer, or the legendary Mike Palmateer, was traded to the Caps.

McCallum loves this style of ownership. “Legitimate good people.” That’s how he phrases it.

Anyway, Leonsis informed McCallum by email that if he ever found himself floating through D.C. he should come on by.

Which is how Chris McCallum and his brother Mike get to be seated now in the front row of the owners box in the Verizon Center as the Caps face St. Louis — this is in early March — and Ted Leonsis keeps a bead on the puck with the concentration of a cat about to pounce on a mouse and general manager George McPhee, looking characteristically grave, paces in those sleek slip-on loafers, lacing and re-lacing his hands, uttering at least once a “God damn,” until Jason Arnott scores with five minutes and 19 seconds remaining taking the Caps to a 3-2 lead and an ultimate win causing McPhee to give Leonsis the thumbs-up before sliding, handsome and ghost-like, out the door and causing Chris McCallum to crack that cavernous smile, signaling that he too is a happy, happy man.

So you might think this is a story about hockey.

And you might think this is a story about beer — more on that later.

But it’s really a story about a businessman and a social compact and thereby a lesson in hockey ownership, which, in Toronto hockey terms, evokes the almost faceless and assuredly bloodless institutional hand of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, 66 per cent owner of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, a big, fat, private equity piece that, thank the lord, is on the sales block.

Okay, just one point about beer. Caps fans have a buffet of beer choices, from Beck’s to Boddingtons to LandShark. Eat your hearts out, you Molson-pour Leafs hostages, I mean, fans.

More carbon dating: “It’s been longer than the Washington Capitals have been in business.”

Sigh.

It’s the morning of the Caps-Blues game, hours before the slamming “Rock the Red” onslaught, the ear-piercing team branding that has had the unlikely result of transforming Redskins-devoted D.C. into a hockey town.

Leonsis keeps a corner office in the Verizon Center, which anchors what had been a hardscrabble part of town until Caps and NBA Wizards (née Bullets) builder Abe Pollin dedicated himself to erecting an arena in what seemed the unlikeliest corner of D.C. Keeping the team in Maryland — the Caps launched in Prince George’s County in 1974, seven years after the Leafs last won the Stanley Cup — would have been a safer bet. Washington, after all, sits at the verdant commercial nexus of Maryland and Virginia and draws 70 per cent of its fan base from those two states.

Yet Pollin dragged the Caps to the run-down, burned-out remnants of the east end. Throwing more than $200 million of his own money into the pot, Pollin’s vision was a sports and entertainment complex that would trigger the rebirth of the nation’s capital as it spreads from the intersection of F Street and Sixth. “His single biggest act of generosity was building the building when the city couldn’t help,” says Leonsis. “When I came to Georgetown (he attended the university in the ’70s) you were told never to go past 10th Street.”

Leonsis favours French cuffs and has the meticulously buffed appearance of someone who has just stepped from the spa. “Sporty” is not a word that springs to mind. Instead he is a man of passion and appetites, a living-large type. Which brings to mind a phrase used by America Online founder Steve Case when Case was urging Leonsis to corporately marry AOL 18 years ago: “Life’s too short to drink bad wine.”

Precisely.

Through the windows of Leonsis’s sunbathed office, the F Street strip is a vibrant commercial district. The signage for the Legal Sea Foods fish and oyster joint dominates the opposite street corner, disgorging legion of Caps fans in the pregame minutes: 2.5 million turnstile trippers pass through the Verizon each year.

In 1999 Leonsis paid $85 million for the Caps, and a further $110 million for 44 per cent of the Verizon Center, the Wizards, the WNBA Washington Mystics and the Baltimore-Washington Ticketmaster franchise (since sold).

Abe Pollin died in November, 2009. Seven months later, Leonsis led the newly formed Monumental Sports & Entertainment, of which he is the majority owner, in purchasing the outstanding 56 per cent of all of those assets for something on the order of $300 million.

Short story: Leonsis today reigns over the fifth-largest media market in the U.S. with a population base of 5.5 million people spread through that aforementioned commercial nexus. The continuation of the story plays like this: “I’m going to own my own network one day. It makes sense. I blog every day. I own these web sites. And then we own sports teams. Nothing brings a city closer together than a winning sports teams.”

Double sigh.

Leonsis speaks to the intermingling of community interests. He sits on the board of Georgetown. Georgetown is important to Washington. Basketball is important to Georgetown. The university men’s basketball team plays at the Verizon. The Verizon is three blocks from the Capitol. Universities, public gathering places, iconic real estate, sports teams, each connected to the other. “They represent longevity,” Leonsis notes. “They represent a big community of interest.”

Which means what?

“I have a much bigger social responsibility than I ever thought imaginable when I bought the hockey team. I’m front and centre in defining the psyche and representing the city that I live in.”

I’m feeling light headed. No. 1 on my wish list for new Leafs ownership: An owner that is front and centre defining the psyche of this city.

Possibly it’s time to hang a Caps banner above the monstrously huge urinal that resides in my basement. (And which could use one of those scented pucks, by the way.)

Back to Leonsis. He says this is bigger than winning, though winning would be good.

Recall the moment when Joe Namath took the New York Jets to the Super Bowl in 1969. Leonsis was there with his father and thus was imprinted with a sharp generational memory that recently brought him to tears. “If I can win a championship and make a memory that 50 years later makes a grown man cry because he remembers the time he was with his dad or his friend or his mom, I mean. What a job. What a business that is.”

Pension plans do not cry.

In its first season, ’74-’75, the Caps lost 67 games. Point total: 21. That’s not a misprint. In 1982, Abe Pollin set a team goal of selling out the first 10 home games and set a target for season’s ticket sales at 7,500.

This season, the Caps exited the month of March with 12 wins and three losses, one point behind the Philadelphia Flyers in the Eastern Conference. The team is on its way to a 100th consecutive home game sellout and, among U.S. teams, is second only to the Flyers in paid admissions. Overall NHL paid admissions standing: sixth.

The journey has been not smooth.

A decade ago, Leonsis assumed that there was some sort of prescribed business formula that would make hockey turn a profit. “I built a $100-billion company. Everything I touched did well. And then you get to sports and you press buttons that you’re accustomed to pressing, and it doesn’t work.”

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You could say that one of the early buttons the team pressed was paying through the nose for Jaromir Jagr, whom they acquired from the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2001 and handed a seven-year, $77 million contract. “It was a big deal,” Leonsis recalls. “When he arrived at the airport there were 3,000 people who went to the airport. There was a police escort of Jagr from the airport to here. When it didn’t work out, all 3,000 people who were there wrote me emails and said ‘I knew this wouldn’t work.’”

What Leonsis calls the “freak out and leave” strategy wasn’t an option.

Leonsis has his take, framed by life experiences.

The poor kid born to Greek immigrant parents grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Lowell, Mass., and knew Dicky Eklund, “The Pride of Lowell” boxer made tragically infamous by Christian Bale’s Oscar-winning performance in the film The Fighter. “The Fighter was a romanticized view of Lowell. Lowell,” says Leonsis, “was not a place you would want to hang around in.”

There was the job in the vinyl moulding factory. And the dress factory, where Leonsis worked as a sweeper and dress steamer and ended his shift only after cleaning the women’s washrooms.

Leonsis’s father was a waiter and it was a tough task to squirrel away the dough — seven bucks a ticket — to take his son to those Jets games.

The son’s business trajectory was like a vapour trail, especially marked by the sale of his Redgate Communications in the fall of 1993 to AOL. Leonsis’s 13 years at AOL made him a millionaire many times over. Putting aside the company’s ultimate merger with Time Warner — “Consistently described as the worst merger in the history of mankind, so yes I’ve experienced failure” — the AOL years were reputation making.

“The irony of it,” says Leonsis, “is that I was chairman and president of AOL, a company valued at $150 billion. And people cared about it. But no one would cry 50 years later thinking, remember that welcome screen on AOL 3.0?”

Business success waxes and wanes.

Sports memories are engraved forever.

Of course he wants to win the cup.

“Every year you want to think you are a competitor for a Stanley Cup,” he says. “You just have to feel that. That has to drive you. I’ve come to learn that the playoffs are so different from the regular season, and that luck plays a big part in things, health plays a big part in things, a hot goaltender plays a big part in things, officiating plays a big part in things.”

The Caps lost in the first round of the playoffs last year.

So Leonsis ceaselessly markets the franchise. In person.

His face is there on the Caps website. He posts to his Ted’s Take blog daily, usually multiple times on many topics. By 10 a.m. he has answered 60 emails.

Pension plans do not blog.

Another point about beer. So the guys were complaining about the urinals because, apparently, when you approach a urinal with what I am told is often two beer in hand, it is awkward. Who wants to put a cup of beer on the floor?

I hear you.

So Leonsis figured out a way to have a ledge installed at the top of the urinals so beer-toting men would find it easier to pee.

Guinness. You can get a Guinness at the Verizon, which would go nicely with a smoked beef brisket sandwich, which you can also get.

Leonsis is accessible. He seems to know every soul in this town. He addresses military brass and families one evening, and young entrepreneurs the next. He throws his weight behind such philanthropic endeavours as D.C. Central Kitchen, which marries cook’s training to the distribution of food to the poor in the capital. It’s a phenomenal program. He mentors inner city kids. He has many very rich friends who are very unhappy. Happiness is a higher calling. Money? “If I wanted to make more money I would have invested more money in Groupon,” he says of the Chicago-based group-buying phenomenon. Leonsis was an early investor.

Do the Caps make money? “On a cash basis? We’re not profitable,” Leonsis admits. “We’ve never been profitable. We’re really close…. The building makes money and the Caps and the Wizards lose money and in the aggregate we’re pretty much breaking even.”

The Leafs are in a league of their own. “You’re in the Vatican of hockey. It’s the Vatican,” Leonsis practically bleats of Toronto’s enviable position. “I can never take a day of support for granted here.”

In that, Ted Leonsis may have put his finger on precisely the problem.