I've been in press boxes covering the Penguins spanning the continent and several decades, and never once had I been handed an unsolicited printout from the team's media relations staff to highlight an NHL rule.

But there it was Saturday afternoon at PPG Paints Arena, in the middle of the eventual 5-4 shootout victory over the Jets, complete with handy yellow highlighter:

DEJAN KOVACEVIC / DKPS

Oh, my.

This was, as anyone might've guess with the way this season's gone, from Rule 69.1: Interference on the Goalkeeper.

The passage in yellow: "If a defending player has been pushed, shoved, or fouled by an attacking player so as to cause the defending player to come into contact with his own goaltender, such contact shall be deemed contact initiated by the attacking player for purposes of this rule, and if necessary a penalty assessed to the attacking player and if a goal is scored it would be disallowed."

Now, there's no visual example accompanying Rule 69.1, but if there'd been one, here's betting it would've been ... well, precisely this play:

I'm not about to insult anyone's intelligence by elaborating as to why that's the literal definition of goaltender interference. I mean, it's right there in black and white. In the book too.

Still, neither of the on-ice referees, Kelly Sutherland or Carter Sandlak, called it correctly. And when Dan Muse challenged, the NHL's replay people in Toronto didn't do their jobs, either. The goal stood, drawing -- and deserving -- every decibel of the vitriol that'd descend from the 18,360 on hand who've seen this script a few too many times this winter. 

But hey, at least the league's later statement shed a lot of light on the matter: "Video review confirmed no goaltender interference infractions occurred prior to Morgan Barron's goal."

So Erik Karlsson, in spite of intensive evidence available to any eyeballs anywhere, was never plowed into Arturs Silovs. And Silovs was never launched all the way below the Pittsburgh goal line. Good stuff, gentlemen. Get back to watching the Leafs game or something.

Muse's challenge record now on goaltender interference: 0-8.

Insane.

I asked the man, only half-kiddingly, if he'll just keep challenging these until he wins one.

"I'm shocked that this question would come up again," he'd come back, also with some humor. "The GMs had meetings recently. Kyle was down there."

He referred the NHL's General Manager Meetings conducted last week. Kyle Dubas attended. The subject of goaltender interference was raised, much to the ire of Gary Bettman, who's never met a perceived problem he wouldn't prefer to bury.

"Kyle came back and, obviously, there were things that did come up during those meetings and he wants to inform me on, so we discuss them," Muse proceeded. "One of those was on goalie interference. It was obviously a topic there. And the instructions to me from Kyle were we want go by the book. And so, it comes up again now, shortly after."

And this, again, could've qualified as Exhibit A.

"We felt that one was by the book, in the sense that their player pushes Karl into Arty. And so, the feel is from me, after just talking recently to Kyle about this, we’ve got to go by the book. That was by the book. That’s the rule. Their player pushes our player into our goalie. That’s why I challenged."

As ever, no one knows what the hell this rule's supposed to be. Including those most affected.

"I don't know what they are looking for, what is goalie interference and what's not goalie interference," Silovs would say. "For us, it's frustrating to give them an easy goal for no reason, but we battled through and managed to win the game."