Darryl Sydor has played in five Stanley Cup finals, so he knows a bit about competing for a championship.

And then trying to recover from it.

The Penguins' extended playoff run means they will have an offseason considerably shorter than most of them have experienced, and how they deal with it could have a profound impact on their 2008-09 season.

Certainly, they can't approach it the same way they would a break that began in late April.

"There's a lot of healing, obviously, that has to go on," Sydor said. "You don't have time to build muscle mass or stuff like that, so it's basically almost like a maintenance thing."

Mike Kadar, the Penguins' strength and conditioning coach, noted the toll taken by a September-to-June season. "These guys are physically exhausted by this point," he said.

But he was adamant that the coming season doesn't have to be sabotaged because of the success the Penguins had in the one that ended with a 3-2 loss to Detroit in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup final Wednesday.

"You still have enough time to recover," Kadar said. "I think maybe guys think they lost so much time because of the playoffs that they don't change anything with their training, just maintain the [normal regimen]. That's not going to work."

Kadar has a basic offseason conditioning plan that he gives to all players, and provides individually tailored advice for those who request it. Because players are spread across the planet during the summer, Kadar recommends that they secure personal trainers to oversee their workouts.

He will have an opportunity to offer most players a final bit of guidance when the Penguins convene for "breakup day" at Mellon Arena this morning. Generally, it consists of exit physicals, meetings with the coaches, media interviews and farewells -- often punctuated by an exchange of autographed memorabilia, such as sticks -- with teammates, some of whom will be playing elsewhere next season.

In coming days, players will scatter and, if they heed Kadar's guidance, will limit their strenuous physical activity severely in the short term.

"The best thing is to just shut it down for the first couple of weeks," he said. "You always want to add some 'activity days.' Not necessarily training every day, but maybe you're going out and playing soccer or tennis, or you're biking.

"For the first weeks, I would say, nothing [demanding]. You're mentally exhausted as much as you are physically.

"The second and third week, just slowly start adding activities, where you're just working on general conditioning and you're maintaining everything you've built up over the season."

That seems to mesh with the approach Sydor said has proven effective for him. Basically, he said, he has found it best to divide the time lost because of an extended playoff run between the period usually spent resting/recuperating and the one devoted to serious training.

"I think you take more [of the summer to] rest, but you have to almost get right back into it, lightly," he said. "Just kind of keep doing it.

"If you take too much time off, you only have maybe six weeks to get going. You just kind of keep plugging along, just not at a heavy [pace]."

Even with a modified regimen, though, experience has taught Sydor that it won't necessarily be realistic to expect the Penguins to be as well-conditioned when they report to training camp in September as it would be if they had lost earlier in the playoffs.

He cited 2000, when Dallas was coming off back-to-back appearances in the Cup final, as an example of how teams shouldn't be held to the usual standards after competing for a championship.

"When we went back-to-back, that second time, in 2000, [at] training camp, guys weren't in shape," he said. "There was a lot of thought given [to not asking too much of key guys]. You don't think of training camp so much. Opening Day is your day to be ready."

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NOTES -- The Penguins, who have sold out 67 consecutive games, drew a franchise-record 888,653 fans to 52 home dates during the 2007-08 season. Their average attendance of 17,089 was well above the seating capacity of 16,940. The previous record of 847,204 was set over 53 games during the 1990-91 season, when the average crowd was 15,985. ... The sale of $5 tickets to fans who watched road games during the Stanley Cup final on the arena scoreboard raised more than $85,000 for the Mario Lemieux Foundation for cancer and neonatal research. ... Game 6 on NBC-TV drew an average of 6.8 million viewers making it the most-watched Game 6 since the NHL returned to network television in 1995 and the third most-watched game of the finals in that same span. The 4.0 national rating and 7 share is a 111 percent increase over Game 6 in 2006.The average for four NBC telecasts (3.2) earned the best rating and was the most-viewed series (5.4 million average) since the 2002 final.