Just before the Super Bowl, the Post-Gazette conducted a poll in its Sports section for online readers. The poll asked readers to choose between the Steelers winning the Super Bowl game and the Penguins staying in Pittsburgh. About half of the voters decided, if they had to make a choice, "one for the thumb" was more important to the city than its professional hockey team.

		Richard "Pete" Peterson is professor emeritus of English at Southern Illinois University. He is the editor of "The Pirates Reader" (peteball2@yahoo.com).

Now that the emotional intoxication of the Super Bowl victory has passed, Pittsburgh is facing the sobering prospect of losing its professional hockey franchise unless an acceptable proposal emerges for building a new arena.

Fifty years ago, Pittsburgh went through a remarkably similar situation. In 1956, the city lost the Pittsburgh Hornets when the walls of the Duquesne Gardens came tumbling down. Though only a minor-league franchise, the Hornets were immensely popular in Pittsburgh. During the early '50s, at a time when the Pirates and Steelers were fielding awful teams, the Hornets twice won the Calder Cup, symbol of minor-league hockey supremacy. But with no home arena, they left Pittsburgh after the 1955-56 season.

When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my father introduced me to the bumbling Pirates and the bruising Steelers, but the high-flying Hornets belonged to my mother. She didn't understand a thing about hockey, couldn't tell a red line from a blue line, but she knew her hockey players.

My mother worked the graveyard shift as a waitress at Rodgers Dairy out on Centre Avenue, not far from the Duquesne Gardens. After Hornet home games, the players would hang out at Rodgers and flirt with my mother, or perhaps it was the other way around. While I rooted for the Hornets, she regaled me with stories about my favorite players. I knew more about some of the old Hornets than a young teenager should have known, thanks to my mother.

Lil Peterson never met a Hornet she didn't like, but her own favorite was veteran defenseman Pete Backor. He even promised Lil's son a hockey stick, a great prize for a South Side working-class kid who was playing out his Hornet fantasies in roller-skate skirmishes at Ormsby playground. My mother kept telling me, "Pete'll get you a hockey stick," but, more than 50 years later, poor Dickie Peterson is still waiting.

When we weren't playing make-believe hockey on clamped-on roller skates, my buddies and I headed out to Oakland to watch the Hornets play the real thing.

First constructed in 1890 as a streetcar barn and converted five years later into an ice rink and auditorium, the Gardens, in its heyday, hosted everything from the Ice Capades and the Golden Gloves to Duquesne Dukes basketball games. For us, however, the rundown Gardens was a freeloader's paradise because of its array of side exits.

After hitchhiking out to the Gardens, my hockey buddies and I would walk around the building, knock on one of the metal sidedoors and hope some paying Hornet fan, remembering his own youth, would push open the door and let us in. If that didn't work, we'd climbed up the fire escape to the roof of the Gardens.

Once on the roof, we'd swing open the door of a small shed-like structure, get down on our bellies and look down on the Hornets skating up and down the ice against their archrivals, the Cleveland Barons. The warm air rising from the Gardens kept our faces warm, but when frostbite threatened our toes, we'd scrambled back down the fire escape and start knocking on the doors again.

Pittsburgh was fortunate, except for the many families evicted from their homes on the lower Hill, that plans were already in the works for a new arena when the Hornets left town.

When the Civic Arena opened in 1961, the Hornets returned and won another Calder Cup in 1964-65. The city became even more fortunate in January 1966 when the National Hockey League, undergoing a major expansion, granted the city a franchise. The only bad news was that the new NHL entry didn't keep its Hornets team name and became the Penguins.

Odds are that Plan A, with its slots money, or a Plan B, with its mix of private and public money, will fund a new arena and rescue the Penguins. But if the plans fail and the Penguins waddled out of town, I don't think the city, without a new arena and without another NHL expansion likely, will be as fortunate as it was in the 1960s.

If things don't work out, we can always go to a Plan C: Bring back the minor-league Hornets to play in a rundown Mellon Arena.