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Tuesday, April 02, 2002

There are two ways of looking at the utterly meaningless game the give-it-up Penguins played against the Montreal Canadiens last night. You can bemoan the fact the team is going nowhere and has no one worth watching now that Mario Lemieux, Martin Straka and Robert Lang are hurt and Alexei Kovalev is being mugged every night by the opponent's top checking line. Or you can suck it up, face reality and realize we had this dreary hockey night in Pittsburgh coming.

Once every 19 years isn't all that bad.

That doesn't mean the scene wasn't surreal at Mellon Arena. Usually at this time of the year, we're getting ready to watch the Penguins take a run at the Stanley Cup. The sellout crowds are excited about what is to come. The energy is palpable. But last night, the Canadiens were the only team in the old building with playoff hopes. There were a ton of empty seats at the start of the game, a lot more by the end of the second period when the Canadiens led by three goals on their way to an easy 3-0 victory. It sort of felt like a Tampa Bay Lightning game. Or worse, a Pirates game in September.

It was as depressing as it gets.

But it also was a pretty good reminder of just how lucky we've been around here.

Everybody knows it has been 12 years since the Penguins previously missed the playoffs. Remember the winning goal in overtime by Buffalo's Uwe Krupp in the final game of the 1990 season that knocked them out? Craig Patrick surely does. He's still ticked that they wasted a season in which Lemieux, bad back and all, had a 46-game scoring streak. It was after that loss to the Sabres that he vowed the team would never sit out the playoffs again as long as he was in charge. Somehow, it seems a little unfair to call him a liar all these years later.

It's been a whole lot longer since there was no reason to watch the Penguins.

They missed the playoffs every season from 1985-88, but they had Lemieux. At least he was worth the hefty price of a ticket. During those four seasons, he won the rookie of the year award, two All-Star MVP awards and, in 1987-88, the first of his six Art Ross Trophies as scoring champion and the first of his three Hart Memorial Trophies as NHL MVP. More than all of that, he gave the franchise something it desperately needed: Hope.

The Penguins went a pathetic 16-58-3 in 1983-84, but that season still had plenty of intrigue. They needed to finish with the NHL's worst record in order to get the No. 1 draft pick and a shot at the big Lemieux kid from Montreal. It was one of the few times in sports history that knowledgeable fans showed up hoping to see the home team lose. More often than not, the Penguins obliged -- some say too willingly -- and ended up with three fewer points than the New Jersey Devils. It might have been the best last-place finish any team had.

That means you have to go back to 1982-83 to find a Penguins' season that ended like this one is. They went 18-53-9, the worst record in the league. Doug Shedden was their leading scorer with 67 points. Unless you saw a Gary Rissling fight, you went home disappointed. Not that many of you bothered to come to the games.

Who could have guessed back then what was ahead for us?

Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr. Their combined 11 Ross Trophies and four Hart Trophies. The chance to watch other current or future Hall of Famers Paul Coffey, Ron Francis, Larry Murphy, Bryan Trottier, Joe Mullen, Tom Barrasso and Luc Robitaille. The chance to see Ulf Samuelsson torment Cam Neely and Darius Kasparaitis knock out Eric Lindros. And, of course, the 11-year playoff run, which included the NHL's second-best record of the 1990s, five division championships, a President's Trophy, two Stanley Cup championships and two other appearances in the Eastern Conference final.

It has been some ride.

You don't have to like that it has ended, but you have to admit we really were overdue for a miserable game like last night's and the ones coming at home against Buffalo April 10 and Toronto April 12 before this season comes to a close, thankfully.

You also have to admit something else:

We have no right to complain.

Ron Cook can be reached at rcook@post-gazette.com.