Remember this as Barry Trotz returns “home” Friday night as the coach of the Washington Capitals: The Nashville Predators wouldn’t be the Nashville Predators without him.

General manager David Poile hired Trotz to be the expansion franchise’s first coach in August 1997, more than a year before the first faceoff. The team settled on a logo – a saber-toothed skull, a reference to a fossil that had once been unearthed in downtown Nashville – before a name.

They brainstormed. They flipped through dictionaries and hockey books. Trotz looked through a Canadian Hockey League guide and found a team in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League called the Granby Predateurs.

View photos Trotz says he still cheers for the Preds as he tries to turn the Capitals into a Stanley Cup contender. (Getty) More

“The Nashville Predators,” Trotz said. “That sounds pretty decent.”

The fans agreed. They ended up picking Predators instead of Ice Tigers, Fury or Attack.

Trotz had never played in the NHL. He had never coached in the NHL. He didn’t know it then, but he would end up playing a huge role in establishing the NHL in Nashville, keeping the NHL in Nashville and building the NHL in Nashville to the point …

Well, to the point where missing the playoffs two years in a row was unacceptable, to the point where he would be fired, take over another team and make this bittersweet trip.

“When I look back at it now, I think, ‘That was crazy,’ ” Trotz said this week. “When I went there, I was just trying to survive through that first year. I never thought in a million years that I would be there that long.”

Trotz helped build the franchise from the ground up. Poile, Trotz and assistant coach Paul Gardner were in the dressing room one day looking at carpet samples, agonizing over colors, when Gardner made a joke.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gardner said. “We won’t be around when they change the carpet.”

But they stuck around so long they changed the carpet at least twice – once because it had worn out, once because of a flood.

Yes, a flood.

Poile and Trotz lasted 17 years and 15 seasons together, and they weathered storms literally and figuratively – NHL lockouts, ownership issues, relocation threats, money problems and more.

Through it all, they sold the NHL where it had never been sold before, struggling to fill seats in bad times, making the arena rock with a country twang in good times. Trotz, a Winnipeg native, liked to say he fought “the war of Northern aggression.” As the coach, an affable guy and a good quote, he served as a day-to-day ambassador in the media. He promoted hockey to Nashville and Nashville to the hockey world.

“People don’t realize sometimes that this is a good hockey market,” Trotz told Canadian reporters in May 2011, when the Predators made the second round of the playoffs for the first time and faced the Vancouver Canucks. “The fans are very passionate.”

It wouldn’t have worked without winning. The Predators didn’t make the playoffs in their first five seasons. But they made it seven times in eight seasons after that, and they made two really good runs. In 2006-07, they added Peter Forsberg at the trade deadline and finished tied for the third-most points in the league. In 2011-12, they loaded up at the trade deadline and finished with the fifth-most points in the league. They were considered legit contenders.

View photos Trotz guided the Predators from their expansion growing pains to perennial playoff contention. (AP) More

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