Since the Capitals won in June, the Stanley Cup has made its usual rounds, spending a day with each player and touring the world—used for keg stands, champagne toasts, and munching on Cap’n Crunch. Last Friday, Caps’ assistant general manager Don Fishman brought the Cup (and a three-person NHL entourage) to the recently opened Mount Desert Island Ice Cream shop in Mount Pleasant.
“I had a sense it could happen,” says co-owner and longtime Caps fan Brian Lowit, who has a friend who works for the team. It was a frenetic summer for Lowit as he was keeping up with the games while trying to open the shop. “For me, opening this business and having the Capitals win the Stanley Cup in the same year was pretty crazy,” says Lowit. “We’d be working all these crazy hours, and then it was like, ‘Okay, I have to watch or go to the hockey game tonight.’ They kept winning—0f course I wanted them to win—but it was also four hours every other night [when] I should [have been] trying to get the store open. And then I was like, ‘But it’s the Stanley Cup playoffs!’” They opened just weeks after the Caps’ victory.
With the actual Stanley Cup in store, Lowit and co-owner Melissa Quinley followed Cup protocol (they were allowed to touch and photograph it, but not hoist it over their heads, a privilege reserved for champions). Lowit plans on commemorating the visit with a framed photo that should pair well with the gaggle of Caps bobbleheads already lined up by the cash register.