DALLAS -- From any frozen pond to any post-midnight beer league to a frenzied "playoff-like atmosphere," as Carl Hagelin was describing American Airlines Center on this mid-February Friday night, any hockey coach's chief admonition to a player defensively can be chopped down to two words: Get back.
Because defense, as with most sports, is usually about effort.
Except when it isn't.
The Penguins did a whole lot right in this 4-3 shootout loss to the Stars, a dynamic game decided when Tyler Seguin was the only man to convert, and even his never dented the back of Matt Murray's net ...
... but also a game that just as easily could be defined by Justin Schultz tying the score with 1:13 left after the visitors huffed and puffed for the final few minutes and at long last pushed another puck past Kari Lehtonen:
They sounded plenty pleased about it, too.
"That's a good point because that's a good hockey team over there," Jamie Oleksiak was telling me afterward, and this from the unique perspective of having been employed by both this winter. "We had to fight out there for everything, and we did. We earned that."
"I thought it was a pretty good effort from us," Schultz would add a couple stalls away. "It's a huge point. We would've liked two, but we showed there's a lot of fight in this team."
There's that word twice now.
There were no actual fights, but they're right. The Stars, now 9-2-1 in their past dozen and winners of five in a row, had played the previous night in Chicago and came with a Ken Hitchcock trademark chip. They stuck it to scorching Evgeni Malkin at every chance. They slammed into Sidney Crosby. They were credited with 40 official hits, their franchise's highest single-game total in three years.
But the Penguins stayed disciplined, built up a two-goal lead and, even after blowing it in the third and falling behind, kept up the fight.
Mike Sullivan also liked most of what he saw.
"Yeah, obviously, we're disappointed we gave up two early in the third there," he said. "But I liked our fight. We stayed with it, we got the game tied. ... They're a good team, and it was a hard-fought game."
Fight. Fought. All of that's fine. No issue with any of it.
But here's where I'll stray somewhat. Because while I liked most of what I saw, as well, particularly the effort, I also witnessed a team that occasionally worked hard but not smart.
Let's start with the hard ...
That's a captain-on-captain crime up there, Crosby backchecking vigorously on Jamie Benn in the first, then flipping the puck a mile high on the clear. He sure wasn't clean in this category for the night, but it set a tone.
That's Brian Dumoulin racing in the second to catch up with Alexander Radulov, the Stars' leading scorer, for a textbook one-handed pokecheck that didn't draw a penalty even on a night when the refs reported for duty with their right arms raised.
Man, that one's wonderful. Could watch it all day. But onward ...
That's Phil Kessel, circling back in the third from out beyond the blue line to bear down and keep Mattias Janmark from sealing a certain defeat.
Those are all highly skilled, highly diligent defensive efforts, all worthy of applause regardless of the scenario.
And credit, too, to Sullivan, Jacques Martin and his staff for going so far as to vary their defensive schemes, occasionally mixing in a Hitchcock-esque trap that visibly seemed to throw the Stars for a loop. That's part of the effort, too.
But where the Penguins still stumble far too often, even during the 10-3 tear that preceded this, isn't in a lack of effort. It's a lack of awareness of where other opponents might be on the rink.
It's in puck-watching, as all three Dallas goals painfully illustrate ...
Above is a Benn alley-oop to Seguin for the first. All eyes go toward the puck below the goal line, then to the right boards, where Benn gains it off a superb Radulov forecheck. No eyes, including Crosby's, notice Seguin, his side's most dangerous scorer, sneaking through Murray's back door.
Above, now in the third, every eyeball follows Radulov deep into the zone. So when Radulov niftily curls a pass back from whence he came, the increasingly great John Klingberg waits for it, then basically just pushes it through Carter Rowney's wickets and under Murray, too.
Now watch it again, but this time just the white sweaters. Yikes.
Above, four minutes later, the Stars take the 3-2 lead after taking advantage of a poor change -- actually, a change should have been made but wasn't, as Sullivan would stress -- to pin the Penguins in their end for nearly a minute before Dan Hamhuis' slap shot beat Murray.
Sullivan wouldn't single out who failed to change, but it was Rowney. Riley Sheahan and Zach Aston-Reese got to the bench after a successful defensive-zone draw and dump into the Dallas corner, but Rowney curiously stayed, and he'd look just as dead on this goal as the previous one.
I asked Rowney about those sequences:
High marks for standing tall and taking the fall there, by the way. Not everyone would do that right after the game.
I asked Sullivan his view, too, of the lapses in general:
Again, the intent here isn't to be a downer or portray this as some broader defeat. To repeat, the Penguins performed mostly as they have over the better part of these past six weeks. But too many goals against means too many goals against, and winning by counts of 6-5, 6-3, 7-4 and 5-4 -- all actual scores through this span -- isn't coming close to the peak needed for a third Stanley Cup run.
The work ethic is there. The work itself remains in progress.