WASHINGTON — The handshake line at center ice Wednesday night at Capital One Arena was both refreshingly new and a long time coming.

The Washington Capitals were the better team in their series against the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, and they acted the part.

The reward: those congratulations from the Canadiens, a return of respect and a turn to the crowd that told those drenched in red there’s more of this to come.

Spring is here in Washington, and it now means what it has for so much of Alex Ovechkin’s career in a Capitals sweater — another game, another opponent, another round.

Been a while, huh?

The Capitals took their first opportunity to finish the Canadiens — and finished them. The 4-1 victory in Game 5 was never in doubt, not after Ovechkin opened the scoring in a blink on the power play in the first period with his fourth goal of the series, not with Logan Thompson locked in between the pipes, not with Brandon Duhaime finishing it into the empty net with hugs all around.“It’s obviously a good start,” said center Dylan Strome, who had two assists. “I feel like this group has, obviously, big aspirations. We’ve proven that we’re a great team all year. We got to keep proving it.”

The reward: the Capitals’ first win in a series since — wait, can this be right?

Yes. Since 2018.

You remember that spring? The whole, hey-they-really-raised-the-Cup-at-the-end-of-it thing? There are no guarantees of a deep run, and the Carolina Hurricanes — a difficult team that plays a difficult system in a building where it’s difficult to play — await.

But the second round can’t come without a win in the first. While the individual games were taut, this series felt tilted in Washington’s favor from the start. That’s because of the Caps’ skill and depth and strength. But it’s also because of their game-to-game, period-to-period, shift-to-shift willingness to take a blow — and respond.

“We had control of the series from Game 1,” winger Tom Wilson said, “which was great.”

Which does not mean it was easy. Carolina, Washington and Florida are the only teams to finish their first-round series in five games — and the Hurricanes needed to endure two double-overtime games to do it. Look around the NHL, and there is mayhem. It would be a surprise if a couple of the Western Conference series didn’t go seven.

Seven years since Washington won a series? You could point to deficiencies in any of those squads. You could also just say: It’s $%&%#! difficult.

“The parity in this league — just in my personal opinion — is unrivaled in any sports league,” Capitals Coach Spencer Carbery said. “… I just think that even in the first round, [teams] 1 through 16, I think no matter what — and you’re seeing it all across the league — it’s a gantlet just to win a playoff game, let alone win a series.”

So if it seems like a while since this fan base has been awash in the feelings from Wednesday night, it’s because it has been a while since this fan base has been awash in those feelings. The Stanley Cup run from 2018 will always be the crowning achievement of Ovechkin’s career — well, other than those 897 regular season goals. But it’s lost on no one that the most recent playoff series this franchise won, before Wednesday, was that Cup-clinching finals against Vegas — seven long years ago.

“You always want to get to the playoffs, and you always want to win as many games as you can,” said Wilson, one of just four players on this team who was on that title team. “You want to win the Cup. … But to the group in there — I guarantee if you ask a bunch of those guys, they’re not thinking about two, three years ago. They’re not thinking about five years ago.”

Sure, the tough times in the postseason don’t matter to, say, Jakob Chychrun or Matt Roy or Thompson or Pierre-Luc Dubois — all new to the Capitals this season. But they can wear on a town that had grown accustomed to a couple of tense rounds most springs.

Yet since the Cup, to review: a meltdown in 2019 against Carolina, when they blew a 3-2 lead in the series and a 3-1 lead in Game 7 at home — and lost in double overtime; a five-game crash-out in the covid-mandated Toronto bubble against the New York Islanders that ended the coaching tenure of Todd Reirden in 2020; a loss to Boston in 2021 in which the higher-seeded Caps won Game 1 and then didn’t win again; a tough six-game loss to Presidents’ Trophy-winning Florida in which Wilson blew out his knee in 2022; and then last year’s sweep at the hands of the New York Rangers, against whom they were simply overmatched.

That’s five tries to win even a single series — and five failures. The assessment of how tough it is to win one of these things: “Extremely difficult,” Carbery said, and he just laughed at the notion.

“Seven years it’s been since we’ve won a series,” said Carbery, in just his second season. “And we’ve been good teams — even post-Cup — there were some great teams. Just unfortunate. … So I could feel it tonight.”

They did it, though. They did it because they were the better team in the regular season and the better team in this series. It played out perfectly: an Ovechkin game-winner in overtime of Game 1; a taut Game 2 in which they got two quick goals in the second period and hung on; a knock-back in an absolutely insane environment in Montreal for Game 3; and then a response in Game 4, flipping a one-goal, third-period deficit into a 5-2 victory to take the series by the throat.

And then Wednesday night, when the Capitals methodically took apart the younger Canadiens. They did so by withstanding a frantic first half of the first period, when Montreal pressured them and could have led by a goal — or two. The Canadiens didn’t, because Thompson was at his close-the-garage-door best.

They did so because Ovechkin scored on yet another blistering shot in a career filled with them, a power-play tally off Strome’s faceoff win. They did so because Chychrun buried a beautiful, cross-crease pass from Dubois later in the first, and because Wilson scored on the power play in the second to extend the lead to 3-0. And they did it — at home. It had been 10 years since the fans who fill this arena got to celebrate a series-clincher with all the red around them, back when Evgeny Kuznetsov buried the Islanders in Game 7.

This group, though, is different. When the final horn sounded, what was striking was the response: The Capitals didn’t erupt in celebration but instead methodically congratulated each other. Yes, the past seven years are littered with disappointments. But this group isn’t those groups. And for these guys, there is more ahead.