Twenty games deep in another rollicking postseason, the Penguins are up to their necks in the very same Red Wings predicament as last year, but with one screaming, discomfiting difference:

Twenty games deep into last year's Stanley Cup final, Marian Hossa had 12 goals and 14 assists, including five power-play daggers, all of which had pushed the home team closer to lifting 35 pounds of silver and nickel alloy than at any time in the previous 16 years.

But one year ago tonight, Hossa played his last game in a Penguins uniform. A month later, he was a Red Wing, based strictly on his suspicion that if he wanted the best chance to win that elusive Cup, he should play for Detroit.

I know, you hate it when he's right.

A year after Hossa awoke with that very suspicion, Detroit has by any reasonable measure the best chance to win the Stanley Cup, and while that's very different from saying it will, the truth is undiminished.

When you consider the two goals Hossa is scheduled to score tonight, the chance appears to be sliding toward a certainty.

"He's playing really well," Detroit marksman Henrik Zetterberg said of Hossa yesterday after practice. "We're really looking forward to Game 4, because he's really been good in Game 4s."

In what is either a statistical anomaly or the rhetorical equivalent of an air raid siren, all six of Hossa's postseason goals this spring have come in Game 4s, all six on the road. He got two April 21 at Columbus, two May 7 at Anaheim, and two May 24 at Chicago.

Is it too late to designate tonight's episode Game 3A?

How about Game 5, The Prequel?

"I'm definitely anxious for a goal," Hossa said six feet from where Zetterberg was rather gleefully announcing Game 4s approach. "It would especially be nice to score here, but it's not easy."

That the Penguins have done a reasonable job against Hossa, a 40-goal scorer in the regular season, a five-time All-Star and as elegant an all-over-the-ice player as you'll find in red and white, is something of a small miracle given the desperate totality of their defensive challenge.

Might it have something to do with familiarity?

"Maybe a bit," Sidney Crosby said an hour before the Red Wings took the Mellon ice. "I think at this point though, most teams know their opponent pretty well, whether you played them or not, with video and things like that. With guys that have played against them consistently over a lot of years, there's not too much you can do out there that's going to surprise a lot of people, [not] with the way teams do their homework.

"It helps a bit, but I think at this point you're already as prepared as you can be."

That presumes that Crosby and his teammates are prepared for the insertion into this drama of one Pavel Datsyuk, absent with a foot injury from the first three games, but now practicing and recovering well enough to bring his MVP credentials to the hot lights of game time.

While you're not booing Hossa through most of three hours, you might keep an eye on No. 13 in white, as the 30-year-old Russian is coming off a glorious winter in which he put up 97 points and joined Gordie Howe and Steve Yzerman as the only humans to lead Detroit in scoring for four consecutive years.

Hossa said yesterday he wasn't put out by Pittsburgh's blizzard of boos.

"It's what I was prepared for," he said of Game 3's acoustics, perhaps the most raucous of the Penguins season. "I just mostly didn't listen."

But he didn't get a goal either, and his teammates seem awfully anxious to get him one against the Penguins, even to the extent that they looked for him in open net situations last weekend in Detroit.

"Those were coming at the end of games, just a couple seconds left," Hossa said. "That's not what I want. The most important thing is to win hockey games."

He'd sorely love to win two more before the next round of impetuous free agency. If the Penguins somehow prevent it, perhaps Hossa would keep them in mind as most likely team to win the Cup next year.

You probably have to fill out a lot of forms to even be considered for that kind of irony.