Written by DCist contributor Eli Resnick.

Hockey is back. Okay, hockey was back from last year’s lockout, but nobody in D.C. noticed because the Capitals spent the year evaluating talent and waiting for a youth movement to arrive. Now hockey’s really back in a “worth seeing” sense. This year’s Caps have two flashy goal-scorers, two solid goalies, and several respectable defensemen. These are claims one hasn’t been able to make about the team since 2004 individually or, if one wants to take them all together, since 1998. That’s eight years without respectable hockey in Washington, so you’re entirely forgiven for asking what hockey is.

Hockey is a sport where players ice-skate rapidly towards each other, seeking out high-speed collisions which can lead to massive injury. They do this for a four inch disk of rubber, which is called a “puck.” When they get the puck, they beat it with sticks in order to try to get it past a goalie and into a net, like in soccer, but again, with big sticks. And sometimes they fight each other. This can lead to more injuries, as well as endless debates over whether blood bounces on ice.

Here in Washington, this has become important again because the Washington Capitals have once again fielded a team that is good at ice-skating, hitting people, taking the puck away, and shooting the puck past the goalie. As an added bonus, it features one of the best ice-skating fist-fighters in the whole world. In the coming weeks, DCist will bring you a short series on how the team went from irrelevance to relevance, with a cheerfully cynical emphasis on just how irrelevant they’ve been. Check back next time the boss isn’t looking.