Maybe you haven’t noticed that the Washington Capitals are surging. That’s OK, because everybody is surging in the Metropolitan Division.

The Capitals have won four consecutive games. Not bad, anywhere else in the league. In the Metro? That’s the fourth-longest winning streak. The Philadelphia Flyers are currently at nine games. The Pittsburgh Penguins won their sixth consecutive game in routing the Arizona Coyotes on Monday, pulling even with the Columbus Blue Jackets' current win streak.

So the Capitals have been a bit under the radar, and that’s fine. They’re a team that probably couldn’t impress us in the first two months of the season. If they were the best team in the league in October and November, they would have been mocked as another version of a Capitals team that can win the easy ones but not when it matters most. They avoided that by being pretty average. That’s a good way to avoid notice in today’s NHL.

Now they’re coming.