AWK: Remove spaces before processing each line?

Hi, all
I have a file containing the following data:

                              name:    PRODUCT_1
                                date:  2010-01-07
   really_long_name:  PRODUCT_ABCDEFG

I want to get the date (it is "2010-01-07" here), I could use the following code to do that:

awk -F: ' / *date/ { print $2 } '

But the result is not exactly what I want, there're spaces before the date output.
Is it possible to remove spaces before processing each line? so I could use the following code:

awk -F: ' $1=="date" { print $2 } '

sed -n '/^ *date: */s///p'

Hi

awk -F: ' / *date/ {gsub(" ","",$2);print $2; } '  file

Guru.

How about perl

perl -lne 'if(/date:\s+(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})/) { print $1;}' infile

awk '/date:/ {print $NF}' urfile

sed -n '/date:/s/.*date[ \t]*:[ \t]*//p' file

Thank you all.