One of the best professional sports teams in the country is a short drive away in Washington, DC, and few students know, or care, at all. No, I’m not talking about the Redskins, Nationals, or Wizards, but our hockey team, the Capitals.

The Caps have finished first in the NHL’s southeast division for the last three years, finished with the best overall record in the NHL’s regular season last year, and left wing Alex Ovechkin has won the NHL MVP award two of the last three years.

However, the Capitals don’t seem to stir the excitement that any other of the major sports teams do, even though the last several years the other sports teams in DC have not played to expectations.

On the national level, the U.S. hockey team defeated arguably the most storied team in history this year with the defeat of the Canadian national team during the group round of the winter Olympics. The team went on to place second in the tournament after being trumped by the Canadians in the finals, but how many Americans seemed to care?

The Canadians love hockey, their national sport, so much during the commercial breaks of the finals in the Olympics, water consumption spiked to 115% that of the daily average for that time of day, and fell to 80% during the awards ceremony, according to EPCOR Utilities, the Edmonton-based company managing the water for the city. Not even the Super Bowl reaches those levels.

Some blame the unpopularity of the NHL on the labor issues between 1992 and 2005. The entire 2004-2005 season was cancelled due to a dispute between league commissioner Gary Bettman and the NHL Players Association. After the season’s cancellation, ESPN completely dropped ice hockey from its sports lineup, leading to a huge drop in viewership.

Unfortunately, in the United States, ice hockey sits firmly at fourth in terms of viewers on the totem pole of the “Big Four” professional sports- after football, basketball, and baseball. When college athletics are taken into consideration, hockey falls to sixth.

Now, I’m not saying that hockey should or ever will reach the level of fanaticism that the NFL incites in the USA, but it should at least get respect for being more than a rules free brawl or just guys beating each other up on ice.