It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the concert of the year.

If you were a 10-year-old girl.

Picture the Mellon Arena floor, where you're used to seeing Marc-Andre Fleury on one side and, say, Chris Osgood on the other. The Jonas Brothers pretty much stretched that far across the rink with a stage-in-the-round, plus wings jetting out on either side to two more smaller circles.

The benefit Saturday night to the screaming young fans, and their well-behaved moms, was that, unlike at the Burgettstown shed last year, you could probably have hit the adorable JoBros with a Wiffle ball.

There were no circus performers -- like seemingly every other teen-pop tour -- but the stage was fairly loaded with goodies. The main thing was a circular conveyer that gave us a Jonas Brothers' Lazy Susan effect. There goes Nick, here comes Joe, now it's Kevin. They had to learn to play their instruments going around in circles. Billy Preston would have been impressed.

Instruments. Yes, the Jonas Brothers do play instruments. Nick, the youngest at 16 and the cutest if you use the scream-o-meter, somehow had the time to learn to play guitar, piano and drums, while singing through his nose. Nick and Kevin both had guitars and seemed to actually be playing them, despite there being two other guitarists in the 10-piece band. (Why their music requires four guitars I have no clue, because it ain't exactly the Outlaws or Skynyrd.)

Actually, the music itself is somewhat overshadowed by the charisma, the curly hair and all the excitement, but that's just the way they roll. The Jonas' delivered catchy bubblegum pop like "Paranoid" (not the Black Sabbath song), "Poison Ivy" (not the Coasters song) and "Hold On" (one of many songs by that title). It's not really helping their cause in the end that my young daughter -- who happens to be named Ivy and likes the Jonas Brothers -- left saying that the highlight of the night was a Neil Diamond song.

Here's the funny thing about that. Joe introduced it telling all the parents to get up and saying it was their chance to "show your kids you still got it." Then they played "Sweet Caroline" -- a song from 1969! Were the parents of these tweens even born by 1969? Weren't they raised on Guns 'N Roses and New Kids on the Block?

Anyway, neither of those bands had the gimmicks the Jonas Brothers brought to Mellon. They had multiple risers, one used very nicely for an unplugged chamber-pop version of "Gotta Find You." They had a trampoline to make "Much Better" much bouncier. They had squirters to turn one side of the arena into a water park on the lights-up rocker "Live to Party" And then, during "Lovebug," it even rained on one of the stages -- in the shape of hearts!

Nick needed nothing but a white baby grand to deliver one of the evening's highlights, the heartfelt ballads "A Little Bit Longer" and "Black Keys" coupled with his empowerment speech about fighting diabetes.

Another bright spot was the reappearance of opener Jordin Sparks for a lively Jonas-Jordin jam on her single "Battlefield" (right, no Dylan/Willie/Mellencamp jam two weeks ago, but we got this). It was coupled in a battle-of-love section with "World War III," a surprising new song about trouble in the bedroom.

From the Jonas Brothers?

A bit grown up, but other than that, moms and daughters got a lively and very wholesome night of entertainment from these Jersey boys, not to mention Sparks, South Korean girl group Wonder Girls (for one song) and the harder-rocking quartet Honor Society.