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Q: What are your three favorite arenas in the NHL? From what you've seen and read, will Consol Energy Center be among the nicer venues in the NHL?

George Black, Tauranga, New Zealand

MOLINARI: Reach a certain age, and there's no shortage of evidence that one has been around for quite a while. The response to your first question is a pretty good example of that, because none of the three arenas on that list are still in use, and two were sacrificed for the sake of progress years ago.

The easy winner would be the Forum in Montreal, which had an atmosphere unmatched in the NHL, and possibly any other league or sport. Morning skates at that place had more electricity than playoff games do in a lot of other venues. If someone could walk into the Forum, whether it was for the first time or the 5,000th, without experiencing a little rush of adrenaline and having the hair on the back of his or her neck stand up a bit, a call to the coroner probably was in order. That French was the language heard most often in the corridors added a mildly exotic twist for those from outside La Belle Province.

Chicago Stadium holds down the second spot, mostly because of its fabulous acoustics and celebrated pipe organ. There were times when the sound waves generated by the fans in that building seemed almost visible, and Wayne Messmer's rendition of the National Anthem probably was surpassed only by Roger Doucet's performances of "O Canada" at the Forum (although the roaring Stadium crowd generally drowned out Messmer's performance).

No. 3 is Boston Garden which, like the Forum and Stadium, was short on luxury, long on character. Its concourses were cramped and crowded -- much as the undersized playing surface there was -- and one occasionally would come across a rodent at ice level that was the size of a small pony, but the Garden had a terrific atmosphere on game nights. Whether it actually had a ceiling was another matter, because there were so many banners celebrating championships and retired numbers associated with the Bruins and Celtics that it was pretty much impossible to tell.

As most Penguins fans probably are aware, Mellon Arena is the oldest building still in use in the NHL and while it does have its unique features -- that round roof might be the most distinctive feature to be found on any of the league's buildings -- it doesn't have the same feel as the ancient venues mentioned above. The same is true of every other building used by NHL clubs today.

A disclaimer: Reporters tend to judge buildings differently that fans, because the things that matter most to writers -- stuff like proximity of ice-level work areas to the locker rooms -- aren't even an afterthought for the people who pay their way into games. At the same time, the creature comforts available to fans in most new facilities rarely mean much to reporters, because media people don't usually experience how comfortable the seats in a lower bowl might be, or how good or bad the sight lines are.

Most of the newer buildings tend to look and feel a lot alike, although some -- Nationwide Arena in Columbus and St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center -- have design features that have earned widespread praise. Not coincidentally, those were two of the places Penguins officials visited multiple times while determining what they wanted to incorporate in the city's new multi-purpose arena.

And while we won't really know how the Consol Energy Center compares to other venues until it opens next year, there is no reason that it shouldn't be among the best in the NHL. After all, the current wave of arena construction in North America began well over a decade ago, which means the Penguins had ample time to study what worked and what didn't in other places, as well as which features absolutely had to be included in the new building and which could be left out.

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