When you're trying to negotiate a deal worth hundreds of millions of other people's dollars, it's foolish to be entirely honest.

The owners of the Penguins realize this, hence their missive this week to politicians who have dawdled in meeting the team's demand for a new arena.

The letter from team owners Mario Lemieux and Ron Burkle follows the tried-and-true form of the genre. It drips with that "as much as this pains us'' tone that is familiar to anyone who has read the sports pages for the past half-century.

In this, Messrs. Lemieux and Burkle are merely playing the game as it was designed. Rare is the sporting palace built without brinksmanship and threats to skedaddle. This particular threat is different only in that the out-of-town offer is so tangible.

But as this dance nears its end, and the band segues from "Kansas City'' to "Should I Stay or Should I Go" to "Money (That's What I Want),'' we can at least dream of the honest letter some of us would like to see.

"Dear Gov. Rendell, County Executive Onorato and Mayor Ravenstahl.

OK, we all know this is one of the few true hockey towns south of Toronto. Our little sport is big here. Folks in Pittsburgh and that other tourist trap, Buffalo, were pretty much the only ones who could even find the National Hockey League All-Star game on the Versus network in January. Most of America could hardly care less.

But our league has a plan to one day be as big as poker on TV, and Kansas City is a huge part of that strategy.

Heh, heh. OK, maybe "huge'' is overstating it. Kansas City is a smaller TV market than Pittsburgh, and it didn't do well with hockey back when it had a team in the disco era. But its arena has this going for it.

It's free. It will be ready next season. Beat that.

Look, we know the offer you're making is pretty fair. But we don't want "fair.'' We want "unbelievable.'' That's what Kansas City is offering.

A small but vocal portion of the populace cares intensely about this and we can play those sports-talk shows like fiddles. We wish more of their listeners lived in the city, to make things tougher on you, Mayor Luke, in the May primary, but we're negotiating through the media as best we can. Not every team would threaten to leave just before it starts selling playoff tickets.

So let's review.

We've agreed to pay $4 million a year for the newest arena in hockey, a palace that might double the value of this franchise. We've said before that "we owed it to our fans to do everything we could to make it work here.'' But let's be realistic. We didn't mean everything. Only one of us is a billionaire.

We'll kick in $4 million a year for 30 years, figuring that $4 million might be worth half that in 2037, and we'll kick in for any cost overruns, but you'll have to cover the rest.

We're not kidding when we say our questions about the slots financing -- our freakin' idea!-- make us wonder if you know what you're doing. The state Gaming Control Board turned down a free arena, saying that was best for the city, but that could look stupid if Penguins fly. Or do you have some other principal tenant that can draw a collective 700,000 paying customers through more than 40 of the bleakest dates on the calendar?

We didn't think so.

Look, we see the same attendance figures you do and know it's possible one of those 11 hockey teams with lower draws could be in a new Pittsburgh arena in a few years if we don't take it. We really don't want that.

The bottom line is Pittsburgh is the best place for us and the league, and we have come up with a way to replace a 46-year-old, full-purpose arena. What do you say we meet each other halfway and get this done for the city we all claim to love?

Sincerely (Mostly),

Mario and Ron

P.S. We can do a better job holding down costs than the state did for the Petersen Events Center. We promise.