Blue Line
Geno Time
By Bob Grove

It took the Penguins less than three weeks to go from the absolute magic of the NHL Winter Classic to the numbing site of Sidney Crosby hobbling down the Mellon Arena runway, his right ankle wrecked seven minutes into a game against Tampa Bay. Almost immediately, the Penguins' minds seemed to race while they parked their game in neutral, losing that night to the league's worst road team.

Where do we go from here? HOW do we go from here?

Legitimate questions both. The first can't be answered until we are able to unfold the newspaper and glance at the standings, sometime next month, when Crosby's high ankle sprain is healed and the game's best player returns to the ice. The second, however, answered itself within 72 hours of Crosby's first major injury.

The next night in Montreal, with questions about the Penguins' playoff chances swirling, Crosby's linemate Evgeni Malkin played the best game of his nascent NHL career. Forget the two hat tricks he recorded in the previous seven games. Malkin's performance that night in a 2-0 victory was not about anything measurable. It was all about the intangible.

The 21-year-old, moved off the wing and back to his natural center position, was the best player on the ice from the very start of the game until he ended it with an empty-net goal after he blew by Montreal defenseman Mark Streit to win a race for a loose puck. Malkin put himself in shooting lanes and blocked shots. He forechecked. He backchecked like his life depended on it. OK, he lost two-thirds of the faceoffs he took, but on this night that only served to remind us that he was, after all, human.

Malkin hounded Canadiens who had the puck and tortured them when he had possession of it. In the second period, he swiped the puck from Michael Ryder deep in the Pittsburgh zone, swerved around Saku Koivu and then flew up the right wing, throwing the puck up to linemate Petr Sykora. Sykora gave it back to Malkin as he hit the Montreal blue line, at which point he went around All-Star Andrei Markov and swooped into the right circle before sliding a pass to a wide-open Sergei Gonchar.

Had Gonchar's shot got behind goaltender Cristobal Huet, we'd be seeing that highlight for years to come.

Two nights later, in a 6-5 shootout loss to Washington, Malkin scored two more goals, set up a third and thumped Alexander Ovechkin after the whistle just moments after Ovechkin had tried to take his head off in the Pittsburgh zone.

The message, to his teammates and to the hockey world at large, was simple: with Crosby out, Malkin was not only willing but capable of taking his game-already at a high level-to new heights.

The Penguins had followed his lead impeccably in Montreal. Dany Sabourin earned a shutout despite playing for the first time in a month, the forwards played both ends of the ice and the defense was solid in coverage.

In the loss to Washington, however, Sabourin was shaky, the Penguins' work ethic was missing and their discipline faltered. They proved they could win without Crosby, then were given a valuable lesson: one game is nothing. Doing it night in and night out, especially given their injuries, was going to be something else entirely. It was going to take good goaltending, solid play without the puck and smarts.

But it is possible - especially with Malkin leading the way.