You could tell he wanted this. Not that he ever made much secret of that—he's got a goalscorer's heart, and the logical conclusion of scoring goals, if you're great and prolific and ageless, is that you end up with more goals than anyone else has ever scored. But as Alexander Ovechkin finally passed Wayne Gretzky in the marathon chase that never stopped being a sprint, he let his desire and pleasure say it all. There was a little extra oomph in his wrister, from his office in the top of the left circle, off a cross-ice feed to beat Ilya Sorokin through traffic. A little extra violence as he uncoiled, a little extra body English on the follow-through, because an extra mile per hour or two can be the difference between a score and a save, and he smelled blood, and he wanted to finish it there and then. Then, when goal 895 was safely in the twine, Ovechkin allowed himself to take his eyes off goal, turned back up ice, and sprawled on his stomach as the Capitals swarmed him at center ice.
Symmetries abound. It took 31 years after Gordie Howe set the all-time mark for Gretzky to break it, and it took 31 more for Ovechkin to top that. Gretzky scored his 894 in 1,487 career games, and Ovechkin has scored 895 in 1,487 games. And counting.
Placed in context, it's not particularly controversial to anoint Ovechkin as the greatest scorer of all time, setting his record in an NHL where teams scored more than a full goal per game fewer than in Gretzky's era. Nor does it diminish Gretzky's place to note that he played in a time of stand-up goalies with small pads, and defensive schemes that were usually just vague suggestions—his 1,963 assists on top of all those goals cements some records that are truly, actually unbreakable. The goal crown only seemed like it was.
In its latter stages, Ovechkin's chase had the air of inevitability, of a massive fish being steadily reeled in by a line that couldn't break. I think it's worth taking a breath and remembering that wasn't so, that so many unlikely things had to happen to get here now. A rookie, with the impossible swagger of a tinted visor and yellow laces, scoring 52 goals? The same guy leading the league in goals in nine separate seasons? Twenty 20-goal seasons? Nineteen 30-goals seasons? Fourteen 40s? Nine 50s?! An age-39 season that featured a broken leg and 42 goals?? It makes you dream of where he might be without the couple seasons lost to lockouts and COVID-19.
Even Ovechkin himself couldn't have seen this coming. In 2016, a Vancouver Province reporter asked him about the possibility of breaking Gretzky's record, the earliest direct question about it that I can find in the newspaper archives. His response? A laugh. "Ten years? I don't think I'm going to play 10 years," he said. He pictured what any rational human would when envisioning a career nearing 40 years of age: a decline. Twilight, not spotlights. As Gretzky said that same year, "the first 500 are the easy ones." There is an alternate timeline where Ovi's pursuit became a joyless slog, a player hanging on too long to reach a milestone. Thank goodness we don't live in that timeline, but instead one where, miraculously, the final stage of the chase was skated by a player still among the league's best scorers, and on a first-place team.
"What a day, huh?" Ovechkin asked during the on-ice ceremony that interrupted the game after his goal, and even afterward, following the 4-1 Islanders win, he seemed a bit overwhelmed by the size of the thing. "This is something crazy," he said. "I'm probably going to need a couple more days. Maybe a couple weeks."
We all need time to sit with the enormity of it, I think. But I secretly hope it never quite sinks in, never loses its sense of improbability. Sometimes I like to go read the stats of great NHL players I never got to see myself. Look at the pages for Howe or Orr or Gretzky's Edmonton prime, and just wonder at the sheer solidity of the numbers. They have a heft to them that makes them almost tangible—almost, but not really. They are just numbers. One day, Alex Ovechkin's accomplishments will be just numbers on a page, read by people not yet alive, marveled over but still abstracted. They won't understand what it was like to see him score goals. You and I will, though. His legend was ours to witness. Every goal of it.
