Hockey fans of a certain age look back 50 years to the first season of the Washington Capitals and recall a team that won only eight games out of 80, making it one of the worst in the annals of North American sports.

Yvon Labre, at age 74, looks back and sees something entirely different.

“Seven of the best years of my life,” he calls his time with the team.

He was a defenseman and team captain, given a chance to play out a dream he’d had as a boy skating on ice-covered playgrounds in Ontario.

“I look back at it and I’m amazed at what came my way, to play in the National Hockey League,” Labre says over coffee at his home just outside Baltimore. He and his wife, Janice, have lived here for several years, in a house just across the street from that of their son, Cory.

Back in 1969, when Yvon Labre was a minor league player, he had a stint with the Baltimore Clippers of the American Hockey League, playing home games at what is now called CFG Bank Arena. He also played for the Hershey Bears, the Clippers’ chief rival, before getting a shot at the NHL when the league expanded in 1974.

It was Abe Pollin, the Maryland-based construction contractor and owner of the NBA’s Baltimore Bullets, who decided to start a hockey team and build the Capital Centre in Landover, Prince George’s County.

The Caps have been commemorating all of that this fall, marking the franchise’s golden anniversary and honoring Labre and other Caps alumni from the inaugural team. There is little official talk about how difficult that first season was, except, of course, in the sports pages.

Barry Svrluga, columnist of The Washington Post, indulged in comparative research to conclude that “the original Washington Capitals expanded the definition of bad.”

In baseball, the 1962 New York Mets lost 120 out of 160 games in the club’s first season.

In 1976, the National Football League expanded into Tampa Bay and the Buccaneers went winless; in five of their 14 games, they scored not a single point.

The 1974-75 Washington Capitals, Svrluga wrote last month, “might have been the worst of all.” The original Caps never won back-to-back games, had several long winless streaks and allowed 265 more goals than they scored, finishing the season at 8-67-5, with a winning percentage of .131, the worst in league history.

But, as Svrluga points out, the cards were stacked against NHL expansion teams in 1974, with the league allowing each of the 16 established franchises to protect 15 skaters and two goalies. That guaranteed a weak start for the Caps and the other new team, the Kansas City Scouts, now, after two moves and two name changes, the New Jersey Devils.

Yvon Labre, who finished the 1973-1974 season with the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, went to the Caps in the expansion draft. He scored the Caps’ first-ever goal on home ice.

“It was a dream come true,” he says.

Labre was a Canadian kid, and getting to the big show was a big deal, no matter how far from good his team might have been.

“I grew up in Sudbury, Ontario,” Labre says when I ask for his life story. “Everybody knows where Toronto is. So you go 250 miles north of Toronto and you’ll get to Sudbury.”

The town had no indoor ice rink.

“We played hockey outside,” Labre says. “I never played inside till I was above 14 or 15. What we had in Sudbury was 28 playgrounds. Every year we had to put spikes in the ground and put the boards on the playground, and they would flood the rink with hoses hooked up to a fire hydrant. And there you went to play. That ice was really brutal.”

Labre says he only tried out for high school hockey to defend his brother, Maurice, who was being bullied at practice by another kid on the team. Labre resolved that situation quickly.

“And from that,” he says, “I ended up making the high school team.”

After high school, in the mid-1960s, he played junior hockey for the Markham Waxers and the Toronto Marlboros. He was an outstanding defenseman in the Ontario Hockey League when the Penguins drafted him. At the time, the Clippers were an affiliate of the Penguins and that’s why Labre ended up in Baltimore in 1969. He was a young guy on a team of hockey veterans.

The Penguins called Labre up from Baltimore for 21 games during the 1970-1971 season. After a stint with the Amarillo Wranglers of the Central Hockey League, he played three seasons with Hershey, winners of the AHL championship in 1974. From there, he went to the expansion Caps.

“I was there day one,” he says.

I asked if he ever grows frustrated with remarks about the team being so bad.

“You gotta understand,” he says, “I wouldn’t have exchanged it for anything.”

That rough first season included winless streaks of 17, 12, 13 and nine games. “But I never gave up,” Labre says.

In a gesture of gratitude for his leadership in the early years, the Caps retired his No. 7 in 1981. A jersey with that number is one of four on display at the Capitol One Arena.

“I was there for seven years and we never made the playoffs,” he says. “But they were seven of the best years of my life. … I was very fortunate.”

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