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Seth Wenig, Associated Press The Penguins' Maxine Talbot, left, slams into Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist in the first period last night at Madison Square Garden in New York. Click photo for larger image. 
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They will not practice today and will be shackled by few rules, aside from the normal nighttime curfew.
They will be free to spend as much time as they want exploring Manhattan's museums and clubs, its galleries and shops, before a team meal this evening, and it's possible that a few of them will.
A lot of others, though, just might stay in bed until the crack of dusk after completing a grueling stretch of five games in seven days with an excruciating 2-1 loss to the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden last night.
New York got the winning goal with 33.8 seconds left in regulation when Penguins defenseman Rob Scuderi inadvertently knocked a Jaromir Jagr centering pass behind goalie Jocelyn Thibault.
Jagr was trying to get the puck to Michael Nylander in front of the net; Scuderi simply was attempting to stop the pass from getting through.
"It stinks," Scuderi said. "It bounced right off my stick and into the net."
Jagr got credit for the goal, which was considerably less impressive than most he scores.
"That was a lucky play," Jagr said, "but we'll take it any way we can."
Understandably so, because New York is battling to maintain a spot in the Eastern Conference playoff field.
The Rangers improved to 36-28-9 and moved past Carolina and into seventh place in the East.
The loss leaves the Penguins (41-22-10) tied with Ottawa for fourth in the Eastern standings -- the Senators have a 42-41 edge in the victories tiebreaker -- and two points behind first-place New Jersey in the Atlantic Division.
Much as losing stings, especially when it happens on a bad bounce with little more than a half-minute left in regulation, the Penguins -- winners of their previous five games -- were justifiably pleased about earning eight of a possible 10 points during the past week.
"You look at the big picture, you have to be satisfied," coach Michel Therrien said.
And Therrien had to be thrilled with the performance of Thibault, who turned aside 40 of 42 shots and has stopped all but three of 83 pucks thrown his way during his past three appearances. Therrien pretty much guaranteed that Thibault will get fairly regular work during the final two-plus weeks of the regular season.
"We want to make sure he's sharp," Therrien said. "We want to put him out there every week. You never know what's going to happen. Even if we think Marc-Andre [Fleury, the No. 1 goalie] is playing really well, we need our other players to be sharp."
Thibault's counterpart, Henrik Lundqvist, played well, too, and neither team scored until 47 seconds into the final period.
That's when Rangers center Blair Betts won a faceoff from Sidney Crosby in the circle to the right of the Penguins' net. The puck went back to the right point, and defenseman Daniel Girardi threw a shot toward the net that Betts steered past Thibault.
Betts' goal was a vivid illustration of the problems that the Penguins' chronic inability to win faceoffs -- they entered last night's game with a league-low success rate of 46.9 percent on draws -- can cause, and underscored how it could be an Achilles' heel for them during the playoffs.
Crosby, though, cautioned against putting undue emphasis on the sequence that led to Betts' goal.
"You lose tons of faceoffs in your own zone," he said. "It went off our guy's stick. That happens. You're not going to win every faceoff. ... You can look at it and say that if you win the faceoff, that goal doesn't go in, but that's hockey sometimes. You make mistakes, you learn from them and you move on."
Michel Ouellet got that goal back at 14:18, pouncing on the carom of an Erik Christensen shot that had been deflected and throwing it past Lundqvist for his 16th.
It looked as if the Penguins would parlay Ouellet's goal into at least one point, but the equation changed when Jagr's centering pass struck Scuderi stick and skidded over the goal line.
Disappointed as they were to lose on such a late break, however, the Penguins still were able to appreciate what they accomplished during the past seven days.
"This one's tough, because we got so close, but it was a bit of a grind and we played some great hockey teams," Crosby said.
"And I thought we played pretty well.
"It would have been nice to cap it off [with a victory]. It feels bad now, but when you look at it as a whole, we had a pretty good week."
