Each Saturday during the ongoing apocalypse, I'll revisit an older column that ran on this site, accompanied by a handful of current observations about it at the bottom.
Because ... hey, why not?
The one below is from the Post-Gazette, the morning after April 17, 2000, when the Penguins beat the Capitals in Game 3 of their first-round Stanley Cup playoff series at Mellon Arena. The article was my first to win a national award, finishing top-five in the Associated Press Sports Editors competition for game stories:
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Jiri Slegr leaped over the boards at the Penguins' bench and charged into the Washington zone. He wanted desperately to catch teammate Martin Straka's attention. And he wanted to do it without letting the Capitals know he was coming.
Why not yell out in their common Czech tongue?
"No, they've got two Slovaks on the other team," Slegr explained. "They'd understand."
So he whistled.
Loud enough to be heard over the roar of 17,148 fans at Mellon Arena.
Loud enough that Straka noticed him streaking down the left side and fed him a sharp pass that landed on his stick in full stride.
A second later, Slegr ripped a sizzling slap shot over the right shoulder of Washington goaltender Olaf Kolzig. It came with 4:32 remaining and brought the Penguins a 4-3 victory in Game 3 of this first-round Stanley Cup playoff battle last night. More important, it gave the Penguins a 3-0 stranglehold in the series as it goes back to the MCI Center tomorrow.
And, to think, the Capitals had been complaining about whistles all series long.
"I do it a lot, the whistling," Slegr said. "I wasn't sure if Marty could see me, so I wanted to be sure he could hear me."
Here's how the play unfolded ...
The score was tied, 3-3, and the Penguins were having a rotten shift deep in their zone. They were trapped for nearly a minute by the Capitals, who forced several turnovers and buzzed goaltender Ron Tugnutt's net.
Finally, the Penguins gained possession and mounted a counterattack.
Defenseman Darius Kasparaitis, exhausted from chasing the Capitals around, didn't join them. He went to the bench, and that allowed Slegr to come on.
"It's a good thing, too," Kasparaitis said. "I wouldn't have scored that goal."
Straka carried the puck across the Washington blue line near the right boards, then quickly pulled up and surveyed the ice.
Right winger Alexei Kovalev saw that Capitals defenseman Ken Klee was skating toward Straka, so he stood in his path, delivering a block that would have made Mike Webster proud.
"I didn't really interfere with him," Kovalev insisted. "I just wanted to give Marty an extra two seconds to make a play."
Straka looked at center Robert Lang charging hard toward the net, but he couldn't find a clean passing lane to get him the puck. He played with it for another split-second, then heard Slegr's whistle and made his cross-ice dish.
Lang, meanwhile, was jostling in the crease with Capitals defenseman Sergei Gonchar and briefly bumped Kolzig. That moved Kolzig a little out position, which doesn't hurt when a shooter is looking for room against a 6-foot-3 goaltender.
Slegr liked what he saw.
"You know, some guys talk about how their shots are lucky. But I saw where I was going. I knew where I wanted to shoot."
It was the top left corner.
He teed up and nailed it. Hard.
"It was a great shot," Kolzig said. "He put it into a perfect spot."
The puck hit the pipe before entering the net, but Slegr said he never worried when he heard the big clang.
"Oh, no, not at all. I followed it all the way in. I knew it was in."
Two years ago in Japan, Slegr scored a goal that helped bring the Olympic gold medal to the Czech Republic. It made him a national hero in his homeland and established him as one of the game's most gifted two-way defensemen.
He called this goal bigger.
"For sure, this is the biggest goal of my career," Slegr said. "The Olympics were great, but these are the Stanley Cup playoffs. This is the best hockey there is."
To celebrate his score, Slegr did his customary leap against the glass. He described it as his way of showing appreciation for Pittsburgh's hockey fans.
"It means a lot to me," Slegr said. "I'm happy when I score, and I hope our fans are, too."
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As promised, a few remarks:
• For anyone who doesn't know, I worked at the Post-Gazette beginning with my freshman year of college in 1985 and all the way through 2010. A quarter-century is a long time to be anywhere, and I'm proud of having been part of that venerable institution. The above article came in my third full season of working alongside Dave Molinari on the Penguins beat.
• The APSE awards are pretty much as good as it gets in American sports writing. It didn't take long for me to stop caring about awards in general, but at the time it felt like a really big deal. My other APSE national honors: 2011: Sports columnist, fourth place. 2009: Breaking News, honorable mention. Project Reporting, honorable mention. 2008: Breaking News, second place. Project Reporting, third place.
• Before anyone asks, no, this site, meaning DK Pittsburgh Sports, doesn't submit entries for awards. We would if anyone on our staff asked, and we've made that clear, but we'd be placed in a weird online-only category where, candidly, the competition wouldn't be anywhere near what's described above, where a major newspaper's entries would go head-to-head with the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, all the big players. Winning that meant best of the best.
• Journalists who obsessively enter contests casually refer to each other with the gag-worthy term 'journos.' Ewwww ...
• This article was written in less than a half-hour. Such were (are) the bane of print deadlines. Not a word of it's been changed/corrected from the original writing/editing.
• I can't overstate how influential this article was in my writing. Not because of the award, but right away. If some of the rhythm and phrasing feel even slightly familiar, that's because this set the template for how I grew to love covering games. Find a moment, single moment, and own it. Ask questions about that moment in the locker room. Ask as many people who were involved because one never knows who'd know something special.
• I wanted to share a video of the actual goal. Couldn't find it. Anywhere. But I was lucky to find that fine photo by the Associated Press' Keith Srakocic -- who still holds that post here in Pittsburgh -- to accompany this retrospective.
• Slegr, one of the great humans I've covered, told me about the whistle after the pack of microphones and cameras had moved on from his stall. That's when I had to pounce on everyone else I could find for more. People sometimes ask why reporters need to be inside the locker rooms to their best work. This is why.
• Apropos of nothing, later that same calendar year, when the Penguins flew to Tokyo to face the Predators to open the 2000-01 NHL season, Slegr fell asleep on my right shoulder on the 13-hour Delta commercial flight we all took across the Pacific. This amused the hell out of Jaromir Jagr, who snapped multiple pictures of it while Slegr snored. And I didn't sleep a bleeping wink.
