How many hockey pucks must drop in spring to pay for a firefighter in the fall?

There's no definitive answer, but the 11 home playoff games at Mellon Arena brought more than $1.7 million in parking and amusement taxes to a strapped city budget. It's no long-range answer to the city's chronic woes, but it's a timely little bonanza in a year when every level of government is scrambling for spare change.

The figure is the Penguins' estimate. The number is conservative, given that it takes in only the parking lots that the team controls. Private lot owners near the arena pay the city's 37.5 percent parking tax, too. And it's impossible to tally all the eventual income from the tavern owners on the South Side, North Side and in other city neighborhoods whose bottom lines have been bolstered by hockey fans saying, "Bottoms up."

The knock on such estimates always has been that the sports dollar is discretionary income. The thinking goes that if people don't spend their entertainment money on hockey, they'll spend it at the movies or Kennywood or some other fun spot. So we're really just talking about moving local dollars around, right?

Not on your autographed picture of Sidney Crosby.

An extended hockey playoff season is a unique economic animal. The cost of a playoff ticket is rich at the start, and it rises as a team advances. A season ticket-holder buying a mid-level pair of tickets for each playoff game has spent more than $3,000 in this long post-season, and he's looking at the cost of paying for the upcoming regular season, too.

The figures are so daunting, there have to be some in the hockey horde who are cutting back elsewhere to make ends meet. Grand summer vacations are the most obvious target. It seems likely that dollars that had been destined to be spent out of state are going to stick closer to home now.

Goodbye, Cancun. Hello, Conneaut Lake.

For the city, it's all gravy. It budgets for one playoff series (and, given that 16 of the 30 National Hockey League teams make the playoffs, that's no great reach.) With more than 80 percent of the playoff ticket money coming from the latter three rounds, the city is better than $1.3 million over budget on hockey revenue.

That money arriving via the 5 percent amusement tax is coming from thousands of mostly suburban fans who didn't budget for this either. Take Dick Carlins, 79, a retired salesman in Baldwin borough and a season ticket-holder for more than 20 years.

His C Level seats are great, just a row behind the Igloo Seats where folks pay upwards of 50 percent more. He shares the regular season with others, but when he looked at the rising prices for the four levels of playoffs -- going from $99 to $118.80 to $141.90 to $191.40 for this final round -- he decided to make television part of his playoff menu.

Mr. Carlins saw five playoff games, taking either his wife Jean, son Russell Carlino, or grandson Anthony Carlino, 17. He also sold his regular-season ticket partners some games at face value. But he enjoyed a modest profit selling two pairs of ducats on the Penguins TicketExchange, including a pair to Tuesday night's 2-1 thriller.

He has no regrets. Even after paring his costs through the ticket exchange, he wound up spending $800 on these playoffs. He already has paid almost a third of the cost of next season's $6,127 regular-season tickets, too. A fan needs to economize where he can.

I'd expect other fans made similar moves. Had Mr. Carlins bought and kept two tickets for all 11 playoff games, he'd have spent more than $3,000 atop his $5,676 ticket package for the 2008-09 season. That can do to a budget what Alexander Ovechkin can do to a knee.

As for the city coffers, well, the Stanley Cup will be decided tomorrow night, but Grant Street already savors its hockey victory.