The night before he’d been in Hershey, Pennsylvania, playing for the Capitals AHL affiliate and getting ready to go home and tend to his newborn daughter but on Sunday, Garrett Mitchell was on the ice at the Verizon Center.
Underneath his helmet, his cheeks ached from smiling all day. He was nervous, out there with Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom for the opening draw, having been called up to the big leagues for the first time in his eight-year professional hockey career. He still had on a well-worn compression shirt with the Hershey Bears logo underneath his new Capitals sweater.