NEW YORK >> Alex Ovechkin could not contain his happiness moments after scoring his 895th goal to break Wayne Gretzky’s NHL record.

After firing the puck into the net, Ovechkin turned and did a belly-flop slide down the ice like he had just won a pee-wee hockey game. The gap-toothed grin didn’t leave his face for hours.

“We did it!” he told teammates in an electric visiting arena with over 17,000 fans locked in on his every move. “It’s history! Yeah!”

Ovechkin was the epitome of joyfulness on goal No. 895, just like he’s been on so many of his previous 894, replicating jumping into a fountain in Washington when he and the Capitals won the Stanley Cup in 2018.

“Almost,” Ovechkin said.

That title, the franchise’s first championship, was the Capitals’ high-water mark, but this stuck out in a different way.

The Cup gets handed out once a year. Ovechkin broke a record that stood for more than three decades, with the chance for his reign to last even longer.

At a time of the season in a team-centric sport that is usually reserved only for playoff races, Ovechkin’s “GR8 Chase” captivated the hockey community and reached the rest of the world clearly eager to witness something special.

“It’s a testament to Ovi,” said center Dylan Strome, who along with Tom Wilson had the assists on Ovechkin’s record-breaker Sunday in a 4-1 loss to the New York Islanders. “Everyone wants to see him succeed because he’s such a happy guy.”

The charismatic Russian superstar has made a career out of scoring like no one else and commemorating the moments like few others.

Whether it was jumping into the glass or mimicking that his stick was on fire, Ovechkin has become one of the faces of the game in part because of his child-like love of the game, even in his 20th NHL season.

He is a little kid at heart playing a grown-up sport.

“You just smile every time you see it,” coach Spencer Carbery said, echoing Strome about Ovechkin being just as happy to see his teammates score. “It speaks to him, but also who he is as a captain and as a leader.”

No team or goaltender wanted to be the one to give up No. 895, but the Islanders — and netminder Ilya Sorokin, 10 years younger than Ovechkin, giving the fellow Russian his stick when asked — still had full appreciation of the moment.