Faceoff Factor

The Very Best of Days

C.J. "Stoosh" Jiuliante | Pittsburgh Penguins

Mar 12, 02:12 AM | Hype this story!

I’ve been told more than a handful of times that sports are such trivial things; that they aren’t worth getting worked up over as some of us allow ourselves to do. But if that’s the case, why do so many invest so much emotion in something so trivial?

Why is it that an entire city can come to a screeching halt and pack the downtown streets in bitter cold weather to celebrate their team winning a championship?

How is it that an athlete can play his final game in front of tens of thousands of people he’s never met and reduce every one of them to tears by the end of the game?

How is it that something as trivial as a hockey game can alter the entire public consciousness of a nation? Is something that reaches those ends really “trivial”?

And how does something as trivial as a sports team elicit so much raw emotion from so many when the threat of that team leaving town becomes very real?

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It was just going on 11:00 PM on Monday, March 12, 2007, as I was sitting in the game room here at Castille de Stoosh, flipping randomly past TV stations and fighting off sleep. Given that it was a Monday night and I had to go to work the next morning, I decided to watch a bit of the late night news and then head off to bed. I happened to flip over to KDKA just as the clock hit 11:00 and they were beginning their newscast.

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We were first introduced to the arena discussion sometime around the 1996-97 season when then-owner Howard Baldwin brought Roger Marino into the fold. We watched as Marino wore out his welcome very quickly, taking that sketchy trip to Kansas City to take a look at their arena, fueling speculation that he had plans for the franchise that didn’t involve Pittsburgh. We watched Marino wage a very public and very dirty battle with Lemieux over some $34 million still owed to Lemieux under the last contract he signed with Baldwin.

We watched the uncertainty that hung over the team in the fall of 1998 when the Pens declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and all the talk seemed to center around only two options – relocation of the team or dissolution of the franchise.

After enduring a year of questions and scenarios that explored every option BUT keeping the team here, we celebrated in September of 1999 when Lemieux – in an incredible longshot – was awarded ownership of the team out of bankruptcy court. We wrapped ourselves up in the euphoria of his announcement that he was keeping the team here and that he’d work with city and county leaders hand in hand on a new arena for the team.

We thought the team was definitely here for good.

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The KDKA 11:00 news that night began with one of those “Breaking News” alerts – the ones that break a story so big, the producer decides to pre-empt any of the normal newscast introductions and go right to the anchor and a reporter on the scene. For those who care the most about the story being broken, it’s one of those alerts that cause you to always remember where you were and what you were doing the exact time the news hit you. If the story so impacts you, it’s one of those news alerts that can very well change the course of your day, maybe even more.

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We watched as the elation over the Lemieux ownership settled quickly into the realization that the team was operating under financial constraints that didn’t previously exist. Player salaries also seemed to be increasing exponentially across the league, compounding problems for a team bound by a bankruptcy restructuring agreement.

We forgot all those concerns once more in December of 2000, when Lemieux announced that he was returning to the ice. It made for an incredibly surreal remainder of the season, one that ended at the hands of the New Jersey Devils in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Little did any of us know that everything would be mostly downhill from there.

We watched as escalating salaries and payroll limitations forced the club to trade or let go of Jagr, Robert Lang, Darius Kasparaitis, Alexei Kovalev and Martin Straka over the next three seasons. We watched Lemieux grow frustrated as injuries limited his ice time and more criticism was heaped on his ownership as the team descended into the NHL basement thanks to a payroll trimmed to bare minimums.

As the lockout of 04-05 loomed, city and county leaders continually brushed aside any talk of funding for a new arena, leading many of us to become skeptical of their intentions to keep the team here. Lemeiux’s frustration was becoming more evident with the arena issue as elected officials continued to stonewall his attempts to discuss plans for the new building. It certainly did little to calm concerns on our part over the long-term future of the team here in Pittsburgh.

We endured the cancellation of the 04-05 and wondered if the game would ever return. After sitting idle for more than a year, the resolution to the lockout came quickly in the summer of 2005 with the announcement that the NHL would return in 2005-06 under a new economic structure – salary cap and all – that significantly leveled the playing field.

We had no idea what was coming next. The thrill of the return of the game was trumped only by the realization of the pipe dream that was the Penguins winning the 2005 Entry Draft Lottery and the rights to draft Sidney Crosby. We had our economically-level playing field. We now had our new franchise player. All we needed was the new arena.

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No dice.

Talks escalated, but so did the hostile rhetoric from government leaders who continued to insist that money was not there. The team presented a handful of funding plans which were met with what can politely be described as indifference by the elected officials. The team was told it would need to seek its own funding.

We watched the Pens do just that, partnering up with Isle of Capri – a Southern-based gaming company that would bid on the one slots license that was to be awarded for the Pittsburgh area. As part of its community giveback, Isle of Capri unveiled plans for a fully-funded $290 million arena that would sit adjacent to the slots parlor. It sounded like a drop in the bucket; who would turn down an offer for full private funding on a new arena, one the city clearly needed independent of keeping the hockey team here.

We all know how that ended. On December 20, 2006, the slots license was awarded to Majestic Star Gaming, an entity headed by Detroit businessman Don Barden. Barden promised to build his casino on the North Shore of Pittsburgh and also agreed to help fund a new arena as part of a “Plan B”, but only if money could be secured from other sources.

We had nothing to do but sit, wait and put our hope for the future of our Penguins team in Pittsburgh in the hands of this concept called “Plan B”. We’d seen this play out a few times in recent NHL history and in each instance, the franchise in question relocated. We knew history wasn’t on our side, and that this was about millions of dollars that other cities were willing to fork over to get our team.

We did our best to focus on that team, one that began emerging in the latter half of the 2005-06 season as the best collection of young talent in the league. Crosby, Malkin, Staal, Fleury, Armstrong and Talbot came to be just as beloved in this new era as Lemieux, Francis, Jagr, Coffey and Stevens had been in the Cup era.

For the better part of the next three months, we hung on every single news report of talks between the two sides. We listened to every interview with the beat reporters covering the talks. We held our breath as team officials toured the Sprint Center in Kansas City and talked about going to Houston and Las Vegas.

We voiced our frustration with elected leaders who seemingly couldn’t appreciate what the team meant to the growing fanbase – a fanbase comprised of younger generations that connected with the youthful core of the team, made Mellon Arena a madhouse for Pens fans and hell for opposing teams. We couldn’t explain why these elected officials seemed indifferent to the idea that young people identified with this franchise and saw this team as a reason to stay in the area.

We wanted to be able to take our kids five or ten years from now to Lemieux Gardens or whatever the new arena would be called so they could get to see Crosby, and maybe get them hooked on the game the same way we got hooked on the game. We wanted a chance in the future to party on the South Side after watching this team win another Stanley Cup. We hoped we’d get the chance. We tried not to vocalize our frustration over the fact that this was happening NOW, just as the team was on the verge of so much promise on the ice.

When the team declared an impasse in the talks and the issue seemed on the verge of collapse during the first week in March, we privately wrestled with the idea of investing in NHL Center Ice, just in case Sidney Crosby was lacing up his skates for 2007-08 home games in Las Vegas or Kansas City. We wondered if we could bring ourselves to buy season tickets for an AHL team, or what it might be like to buy NHL ’08 and see the Houston Penguins. We wondered if this is how it felt to be stuck in Hartford, Winnipeg or Quebec City in the mid 1990’s.

We made sure to get to Mellon Arena before games a little bit earlier or hang around afterwards a little longer. We made sure to take one last good look around at the team and the building ad the fans that were there with is.

You know…just in case.

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11:00 PM. Monday night. March 12, 2007. KDKA tells me that the Penguins and the elected officials have reached an agreement on a new arena that will keep the Penguins in Pittsburgh.

Everything changed.

As I followed the process throughout the last couple of seasons, I always wondered how I would’ve reacted had this worked out the way I hoped….that the Pens wouldn’t be another Hartford or Winnipeg. I always figured the announcement would come during the day and Penguins fans would pack the bars and celebrate as if the team won the Cup. I wondered how that celebratory beer would taste.

After initially bolting into the living room, waking up my wife who was asleep on the couch and scaring the crap out of our dog Buddy (also asleep on said couch), I ended up standing in the middle of the room with my hands behind by head in stunned silence, just watching, taking it all in and making sure this was real.

It was real. The Penguins were staying in Pittsburgh.

There now might be that time ten years down the road when I can take my kids down to their first game, walk up to that new arena and point out Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin on the ice; tell them they’re watching one of the greatest players ever. I can introduce them to the game the same way I was, and maybe it’ll resonate with them the same way it did with me.

Because that’s what this is…this “trivial” thing that we invest so much in as fans. It’s more than just an escape from the routine or a distraction from the realities of everyday life. It brings people together and elicits emotional attachments that more practical things just don’t provide because it’s a departure from the routine. And even that simplifies it way too much.

After a few minutes, I ended up taking a walk outside to let it all sink in, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t get a little dusty outside. Just a little, but what do you expect when this was the culmination of an issue that was almost a decade in the making. Ridiculous? Maybe. Do I care? Hell, no.

Because for those of us to whom this game and this team matter as sports fans, this was certainly among the very best of days.

And the celebratory beer? Fantastic.