Kovacevic: A fine, full season's in the books, but what about that identity?

"No, no, not me!" Evgeni Malkin would chirp at reporters approaching his stall. And this was elite chirping. "Go get Phil first! Phil Kessel available, everybody! Ninety-two points!"

Kessel at least tried to keep cool. Plopped himself down, stripped off his sweaty socks and pretended not to hear, even as he giggled under all that hair flopping around. Then, when the bank of cameras and microphones surrounded him on command, he dutifully rose, applied his equally floppy ballcap and sighed, "OK ..."

Hey, at least he got the cap back.

Minutes beforehand, as Kessel was about to skate out for the annual sweaters-off-their-backs ceremony for the fans, one dastardly teammate snatched that cap off his head -- quite possibly the new press secretary, but I'm not telling -- so he'd have to show off that infamous mane to the roaring ovation that awaited. And as our Matt Sunday captured with the main photo above, that was met with a friendly ruffle of the hair.

Fun stuff.

These Penguins have fun. They are fun. In that sense, some things never change.

By the time the 50th NHL regular season in our city concluded inside PPG Paints Arena at 10:04 p.m. Friday with a 4-0 business-like dismissal of the long-buried Senators, a whole lot of goodness had come to pass:

• Home ice was clinched for the first round of Stanley Cup playoffs, meaning the Blue Jackets, Devils or Flyers must open here.

• The 47-29-6 overall record brought 100 points, the third consecutive season for that and the ninth season in the past 11, including a 28-11-3 tear once the calendar flipped to 2018.

• The 30-9-2 home record was second-best in the NHL, behind only Winnipeg, including 18-2-1 to finish off.

• The power play converted one final time, on Sidney Crosby's below-the-line bank shot, capping a league-best and franchise-record 26.2 percent conversion rate for the season, narrowly beating out the Hall of Fame-fueled 26.0 percent in 1995-96 when Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Ron Francis and friends were playing two-minute keepaway.

• Casey DeSmith made 35 saves for his first NHL shutout and, more important, an oh-so-close nod from Mike Sullivan afterward that he'll back up Matt Murray in the playoffs.

It was, for all its oddities, a fun time:

And now, of course, comes the real fun.

"It's the playoffs," Bryan Rust would tell me afterward. "This is what you play for. This is what it's all about."

Yes and yes.

And now, maybe, maybe a chance to come to terms with this team's collective identity.

Because if 82 games proved anything about these Penguins, it's that they've still got championship pedigree, as well as the physical and mental stamina to push toward that third consecutive Cup. They've gotten this far yet again, and they've done it, as always, with superlative contributions from their superstars.

To boot, they've basically been participating in playoff-type games ever since laying that egg in Detroit a couple weeks ago.

"Down the stretch, we had to play in some big games," Crosby would say. "So I think games like that, that mentality, that all prepares you for playoffs. I think we did a good job, won some close games, won some important points. Now we'll need to carry that momentum into the playoffs."

Fine, but what's momentum without consistency?

Really, who are these guys?

Are they like the crazy-fast, furious-forechecking 2016 team that routinely ran up the shot clock?

Nope. Not like that at all. Sure, these Penguins are second in the NHL with an average of 34.6 shots on goal, and they're seventh in five-on-five shot attempts for and fifth in five-on-five shot attempts allowed -- a critical possession stat -- but the caliber of the chances they conceded went through the roof. Stripped down, the bulk of their offense still came from the league's No. 1 power play, which converted at a stupendous 26.2 percent.

So, they're about special teams, then, right?

Nope. Not in the slightest. Not with the penalty-killing having almost completely crumbled since Ian Cole was traded, coincidentally or not, at a sickly 63.3 percent, 38 of 60.

Remember how the Sharks' prodigious power play was unplugged in 2016?

Or Game 6 in Nashville the next summer, when the Predators whiffed on all five of the evening's power plays?

This isn't some throwaway issue, to put it mildly. This has to get sorted out, and now it'll have to get sorted out in the games that matter most. Which means, in particular, that players who haven't blocked shots for 82 games will suddenly need to do so out of thin air. That's most unfortunate.

So are they like the 2017 team?

Eh. Again, there were bound to be similarities, with so much of the cast intact. Most prominent, obviously, Crosby and Malkin stayed healthy the whole way through and did what they do. Kessel, if you haven't heard, had 92 points and found a way to fuel the playoff version of himself all the way through. Kris Letang was all over creation at times, but he fought back from neck surgery and will be a full participant this time.

Otherwise ... man, it's hard to guess what's to come.

Because some players produced sometimes, others at other times. Key wingers Jake Guentzel, Conor Sheary and Rust would go forever without finding the net, then rip it apart. On defense, Justin Schultz, Brian Dumoulin and Olli Maatta had strong spells, but the cumulative effect was never exactly exceptional. And in goal, where the Penguins were historically strong in 2017 with Matt Murray and Marc-Andre Fleury both at hand, it was equally unpredictable other than one stretch for Murray through January and February.

What's been more vexing by a mile, these guys have opted on occasion to take nights off, totally unlike their two predecessors, a trait that's been particularly prevalent on the road but has been evident pretty much everywhere when it comes to big-time breakdowns.

Even regarding this game, one the Penguins needed to cement home ice, Mike Sullivan's assessment sounded too familiar.

"I thought we had our moments," he'd say. "We gave up a handful of odd-man rushes where I thought we could have done a better job of just getting on the right side of people. You know, we got a couple big saves from Casey that held us in. For the most part, I thought we did a pretty good job."

I'll go full-bore here: There have been times when a two-time champion has looked like it couldn't care less about defending.

So they aren't the run-and-gun 2016 team. They aren't the heart-and-soul 2017 team.

What are they?

Well, first and foremost, they're frighteningly talented:

That's Crosby doing the now-signature bank shot off poor Craig Anderson for the icebreaker in the second period, then Guentzel following suit six minutes later, just as they tried maybe a half-dozen times the previous night in Columbus.

Funny thing about skill: It can beget more skill.

"You're amazed by how many goals he scores like that, how many times he tries it," Guentzel confessed. "Yeah, it comes to your mind."

But we know that part. They can score in their sleep.

What's the overall identity, not just the offense?

Sullivan took that one deep.

"The identity of this team, I think, is about playing with speed, playing with pace, and trying to play that north-south speed game where we challenge our opponents with either our puck possession -- through our speed -- or our pursuit," he began in one of his answers after this game. "And sometimes, our best defense takes place up the ice. Pursuing our opponents in their zone or the neutral zone. Trying to force turnovers. And from that, we can create a lot of offense off that."

He took a bit of a breath.

"One of the things I've talked to this team about a lot is creating offense in different ways. But I think we still have to have an awareness away from the puck so that we keep the puck out of our net. "

Damn, that's beautiful.

Want to know what this remarkable coach is really saying?

"OK, guys, have it your way. I've tried and tried, and I can't get even a handful of you to commit completely to defending, so let's talk about offense instead. We good with that? Cool?"

Maybe that'll be the identity. Some hybrid of 2016 and 2017, where a furious forecheck spins off a defense that's at least dedicated enough to want to get the puck back.

The players themselves will largely contend that they found this identity around New Year's Day, when all those numbers up there reversed for the better, as Schultz and Hornqvist told me when I brought it up:

I'm not a believer. Not yet.

But I could be convinced, if only because in Rust I trust. He's a super-smart kid with a keen perception of all around him.

"You're never going to have the same identity from year to year. You're just not," he told me. "I mean, I feel like we can build on what we did the past couple years, but we obviously had some new personnel, some new challenges. I think we had to adjust. And maybe that took us a little longer than we would have hoped. But I also feel like we really found our stride there in January."

And that stride would be ...

"That's our aggressiveness, our tempo, all the highly skilled players we have and that pace that we bring. Honestly, I think we've found it."

MATT SUNDAY GALLERY