The WASHINGTON POST reports that Caps’ star Alexander Ovechkin is apparently the “online dating type.”

WP: “The Capitals’ strapping superstar met his new girlfriend, a Moscow college student, on the Internet.“

Said girl is a “20-something named Katja,” who, bless her heart, apparently isn’t too hung up on the straightness of her boyfriend’s nose.

Excerpt: “Two weeks ago, she flew here for the first date, and they’ve been together ever since. Ovechkin, 22, declined to discuss the relationship.”

But in a shocking development, Katja has already blabbed to the Russian press about the hookup.

She told something called SovSport that “the two met online last fall after she clicked on his profile on Odnoklassniki, a Russian equivalent of Classmates.com or Facebook, on which they were linked by a mutual friend. Ovechkin saw that she had visited his profile and wrote to her — but she refused to believe it was the real Ovechkin until he gave an interview to SovSport in which he said ‘hello to SPY,’ her online name.”

Katja: “He’d send me a [text message] 10 minutes before the start of the game, and even in between during the breaks, [saying] ‘Thinking of you’ or ‘Honey, I scored this goal in your honor.’ ”

So Ovechkin was texting with Katja between periods? That must have Ted Leonsis pumped, so long as it was on AIM.

We’ve never been a big fan of online dating. Because of the Hillary-Clinton-photo-effect. Top half looks decent, but the bottom heavy crop-off gets us every time.