There isn't often mercy in this game, but there can be a soul.
And so it was that, when a Teddy Blueger backhander glanced off Blackhawks defenseman Seth Jones and skidded between the legs of Marc-Andre Fleury 15 seconds into the first period at PPG Paints Arena Saturday night, there were no regrets on the Penguins' bench.
Nor was there any remorse when, at 5:33, Fleury mishandled a puck behind the goal line, eventually flipping it off the right side of his net, where Drew O'Connor corralled it and tucked it inside the post.
Likewise, when Brock McGinn converted a cross-ice feed from O'Connor at 10:59, and when Danton Heinen buried a shot from between the hash marks 26 seconds later, giving the Penguins their fourth goal on 10 shots in what would become a 5-2 victory.
Heinen's goal earned Fleury an ignominious departure, and he would spend the rest of the evening watching from the runway that leads to the visitors dressing room.
Chicago coach Jeremy Colliton, cognizant of Fleury's legacy here, acknowledged an undercurrent of misgivings about replacing Fleury with Kevin Lankinen -- "That's not something you want to do," he said -- but from a coaching perspective, there really was no option.
Just as the Penguins had no choice but to push for a second goal after the first, a third after the second, a fourth after the third.
The game demands nothing less.
"We're trying to win the game," Mike Sullivan said. "So we're doing everything we can to score goals."
And, to their great satisfaction, most of it worked during those first dozen minutes.
But when the game was over -- when the Penguins had raised their record to 2-0-1 and Sullivan had supplanted Dan Bylsma as the winningest regular-season coach in franchise history -- the guys who had worked alongside Fleury here had a chance to reflect on what he had endured in his return.
They had sweated and sacrificed and celebrated with him, forging bonds that will endure long after the home opener of the 2021-22 season has been forgotten. And they ached, just a little bit, for Fleury after what he went through.
"This is a hard game, and that's a hard position," Sullivan said. "And he's a world-class goalie who's been so good, for so long. So I'm sure it meant a lot to him to start, to play, in Pittsburgh, where he has so many friends and so many great memories. Where he's won championships.
"I can certainly empathize with that circumstance. He's a terrific player, first and foremost. He's a terrific teammate. He's a Grade-A person. ... I have so much respect for Fleury and the legacy he's built in this league."
So, it seems, do his current teammates, based on their verbal self-flagellation after the game.
"Poor Flower," defenseman Connor Murphy told reporters."He deserves a lot better from us."
Fleury had long since departed the game when the first intermission arrived, with the Penguins holding a 4-0 lead and facing a serious concern: How to maintain their focus and intensity in a game in which they had one more goal than the Blackhawks had shots.
For most of the second period, the answer to that question seemed to elude them.
"I don't think we were very good in the second period," Sullivan said. "Give Chicago credit; they pushed hard. Their top players really elevated their intensity and their game, but I didn't think we were as diligent with the puck. I didn't think we played as smart or as intense as we did in the first 20 (minutes)."
That was as dangerous as it was predictable. Some degree of letdown is all but inevitable when a game is so lopsided, and when a team that had been reeling is allowed to start moving in the other direction, there's no way of knowing when it will be stopped.
Or even whether it can be.
"There's no safe lead in the game anymore," Sullivan said. "I've been on both sides of it, so I can speak from experience that when you get up that amount of goals that early in the game, there's so much hockey to be played. If you exhale and get on your heels, sometimes it's hard to get the momentum back."
Chicago had begun to generate some by the time Patrick Kane made it 4-1 five minutes into the second, and the Blackhawks had a decided edge in play during that period, as reflected by their 15-8 advantage in shots.
"We definitely came out flat there in the second period," McGinn said.
Even so, Jason Zucker effectively snuffed Chicago's comeback by knocking in a rebound at 17:55 to put the Penguins back up by four.
That came shortly after Tristan Jarry prevented Chicago from slicing its deficit to 4-2 during a power play. Had Chicago scored then, the final period might have been a lot more eventful than it proved to be.
"If they get one or two, they're back in the game," Zucker said. "And, all of a sudden, you're on your heels."
Conventional wisdom going into the season held that the Penguins would be offensively challenged, at least in the short term, because Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin are recovering from offseason surgeries and first-line wingers Jake Guentzel and Bryan Rust already have had their perfect-attendance records ruined by illness and injury, respectively.
In reality, the Penguins are scoring an average of five times per game -- six in the first, four in the second, five in the third -- which eases some of the pressure to produce a near-flawless defensive performance every time they play.
"We've got great players, all up and down the lineup, from fourth line to first line," Zucker said. "We've had a lot of guys scoring goals."
That's something of an understatement. For while it's hard to overlook the contribution of Heinen, who has scored a goal in three consecutive games for the first time in his career, the hard truth is that 11 of the 20 forwards and defensemen the Penguins have used in at least one of the first three games has chipped in at least one.
Offenses don't get much more balanced than that.
"We still have a fair amount of skill in our lineup that's very capable of scoring goals," Sullivan said. "We believe we have enough in our lineup each and every night to compete in this league, even with the guys we have out. And when we play the game a certain way, with a certain level of commitment and we rely on our structure and our team concept, I think we're going to give ourselves a chance to win."
MORE FROM THE GAME
• Kane's power-play goal five minutes into the second period, when he beat Jarry from the top of the right circle, is the only goal the Penguins have allowed in 10 short-handed situations this season.
• The most striking statistic to come out of this game might be that, on a night when the Penguins scored five times, neither Jeff Carter nor Kris Letang -- two of the driving forces in their offense -- recorded a shot on goal.
• The final 40 seconds of the opening period were contested immediately before the start of the second because of a broken pane of glass that had to be replaced behind the Chicago goal. The NHL put up a press release explaining that such action was permissible under Rule 77.3.
• Kirby Dach's goal at 15:57 of the third period was the first five-on-five goal Jarry has given up this season. He stopped 18 of 20 Chicago shots.
• Zach Aston-Reese, recovering from COVID-19, made his 2021-22 debut, playing on a line with Blueger and McGinn and logging 16:33 of ice time. He was credited with a team-leading six hits. "I thought the line was really good," Sullivan said. "I think they're a great energy line. There's an offensive dimension to that line, I believe, but they're hard to play against."
• If it seemed like the third period didn't take long to play, well, there's a reason for that. After a stoppage just six seconds into the period, there wasn't another whistle until 12:28. That's part of the reason there were only 37 faceoffs in the game, which team historian Bob Grove reported to be the fewest the Penguins have had since the league began tracking that stat in 1997. The Penguins, by the way, won just 17 of them.
THE ESSENTIALS
THE THREE STARS
As selected at PPG Paints Arena:
1. Drew O'Connor, Penguins
2. Brock McGinn, Penguins
3. Danton Heinen, Penguins
THE HIGHLIGHTS
THE INJURIES
• Sidney Crosby (wrist surgery) has been practicing, but no target date for his return has been announced.
• Evgeni Malkin (knee surgery) is expected to be out until at least December.
• Bryan Rust has been placed on injured-reserve with an unspecified injury.
• Mike Matheson has an unspecified lower-body injury.
THE LINEUPS
Sullivan’s lines and pairings:
Jake Guentzel--Jeff Carter--Danton Heinen
Jason Zucker-–Evan Rodrigues--Kasperi Kapanen
Zach Aston-Reese-–Teddy Blueger--Brock McGinn
Drew O'Connor--Brian Boyle-–Dominik Simon
Brian Dumoulin--Kris Letang
Marcus Pettersson–John Marino
Mark Friedman–Chad Ruhwedel
And for Jeremy Colliton's Blackhawks:
Dominik Kubalik--Jonathan Toews--Philipp Kurashev
Alex DeBrincat--Kirby Dach--Patrick Kane
Brandon Hagel--Henrik Borgstrom--Tyler Johnson
Jujhar Khaira--MacKenzie Entwistle--Adam Gaudette
Jake McCabe--Connor Murphy
Calvin de Haan--Seth Jones
Riley Stillman--Erik Gustafsson
THE SCHEDULE
The Penguins are off Sunday, then practice Monday at 11 a.m. at UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex before facing the Stars Tuesday at 7:08 p.m. at PPG Paints Arena.
THE CONTENT
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