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Q: I've been reading some of the euthanize Marc-Andre Fleury, waive Bill Guerin, trade everyone rants lately, but I'd say it's better to blow a 4-1 lead to the top team in the NHL in February than in April, May, or June. Wouldn't you say that, as far as being an assessment, a game like Sunday's -- as bitter a pill as it was to swallow -- has the potential to make this team better when the playoffs roll around? Washington might be a measuring stick. Sure, the Capitals are on a great run, but they're a deep, excellent team, and the Pens nearly beat them. Tweaking over panic, wouldn't you agree?

Andy Hawk, Hamilton, Va.

MOLINARI: Fans overreacting to a team stumbling and not performing to their expectations? On message boards and talk shows? Really? That's pretty tough to imagine.

Your basic premise is correct: The core of the team that won a Stanley Cup last June still is intact, and while there are areas of the Penguins' lineup that need to be reinforced -- has anyone ever mentioned that a goal-scoring winger or a defensive defenseman with a physical edge would be a nice addition? -- there is no need to blow up this team.

Fortunately for the Penguins (and, ultimately, their fans), the guy in charge of making personnel decisions, general manager Ray Shero, isn't going to do anything because someone on a call-in show or online poster demands it. Shero has proven over the past three-plus years that he's immune to outside pressures, and that's a major plus for the franchise. Witness the way he ignored all the calls to trade the likes of Fleury and Jordan Staal, then watched both play prominent roles in the Penguins' drive to the Cup.

And given Shero's history of fine-tuning his roster at or near the trade deadline, everyone whose emotions are overheated at the moment probably should take a deep breath and wait to judge this team's potential for repeating as champions on the basis of what its lineup looks like at 3:01 p.m. on March 3, after the deadline has passed.

Now that all of those asterisks have been attached, it has to be pointed out that there is no good excuse for squandering a three-goal lead, regardless of the opponent or the circumstances. Yes, the Capitals are a tremendous offensive team and yes, the Penguins had to deal with some exceptional adversity simply to make it to Washington for the game Sunday, but that's the way it goes sometimes. Pros have to deal with it.

The Penguins have gotten a lot of breaks from the schedule over the course of this season; Sunday, they simply experienced the flip slide. And frankly, if any of them had whined about what they went through in the evening before the game, it would have been even more troubling than their failure to protect a 4-1 lead.

A final point: As with injuries, there is no quota of blown three-goal leads that a team has to fill over the course of the season, so it's not as if having it happen at the Verizon Center Sunday will help to reduce the chances of the Penguins experiencing such a thing again once the playoffs begin.

Q: Would you consider it unpatriotic if I (an American, living in Pittsburgh) got a Sidney Crosby Olympic jersey? The jersey itself is cool, but the fact that it has the "A" on it makes it real interesting, something we may never see on a Crosby jersey ever again.

Chris, North Hills

MOLINARI: If purchasing a Crosby Olympic sweater -- or, for that matter, a Fleury, a Sergei Gonchar or an Evgeni Malkin one -- is what passes for a treasonous act these days, something is terribly amiss.

Most U.S. fans presumably will root for this country, just as most Canadians figure to cheer for Canada, most Russians for Russia, etc., but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with a Penguins fan wanting to see Crosby or Malkin do well at the Games, or that a Washington partisan shouldn't hope to see Alexander Ovechkin have a productive tournament.

The Olympics, epic as they can be, are a sporting event, not an armed conflict. Keeping the whole thing in perspective isn't a bad idea.

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