I grew up near DC and hopped on the bandwagon in middle school when they were in the conference finals against Buffalo. I was just tuning in occasionally for a while, but the winter classic on new years 2011 really drew me back in and I've caught probably about 90% of their games since then. It's a part of my down time.

This whole thing is surreal. Until this season I really didn't think it would happen. It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't follow hockey how out of reach this was thought to be. When I was growing up, breaking this record was understood to be impossible. Ten years ago, it was impossible. Crazy to see the guy from my team do this. He broke his leg in November.

Context: Hockey keeps track of goals, which are self-explanatory, and assists, the last two players to touch the puck before a goal, usually by passing. Sometimes a goal is scored with less than two assists attached, eg a player steals and scores without passing. On average, most players will have about three assists for every two goals.

Gretzky held the goals record for over thirty years and he (still) has more assists than any other player has goals+assists combined. The numbers are beyond the stratosphere of anyone else to ever play. His highlights are the most boring you'll ever see. There have been a number of players who seem to just embarrass everyone else on a regular basis, looking a million times more impressive, and none of them come close. He had an intuition for where the puck and the rest of the other players were going to be in ten seconds and happened to be in the perfect spot with far too much regularity to have been happy accidents.

Ovechkin is 39 and will not come anywhere near the assists record, he won't even get halfway. He doesn't come close to Gretzky's career. But no one will. This was still impossible just a few years ago. He defied the aging curve and kept up with the top goalscorers all the way to age forty.