JOE SARGENT / GETTY

Sidney Crosby and Rickard Rakell celebrate the latter's shootout clincher Saturday in Uptown.

No, there were no pigs spotted flying across Uptown.

But yeah, the Penguins finally succeeded in a shootout - second time in a dozen tries all season -- to finally fend off the Jets, 5-4, Saturday afternoon at PPG Paints Arena, and it sure felt like that mattered almost as much as the extra point to the 18,360 on hand, based on the bonus-level boisterous reactions to both of the goals, by Sidney Crosby and Rickard Rakell.

The players might've taken it the same way.

"It feels awesome," Rakell would acknowledge with a slight smile. "Obviously, it’s been on top of everyone’s head that it hasn’t gone great. We worked on some yesterday in practice and said that we were just going to try to turn the page and try to go out there with confidence."

This was yesterday in practice, up in Cranberry, Pa.:

Note that the guy who goes first -- and backhands a gem of a goal -- was Rakell.

Now, this was today in the real thing:

Sid hadn't scored in his previous six individual shootout attempts, but he'd be credited with the winner of this round, since he went second and scored while the Jets ... well, I'll get to them in a minute, but they didn't score at all. He went for the very familiar move of holding to the forehand, drifting and firing upstairs, and he did so with enough precision to beat no less an opponent than Connor Hellebuyck.

Rakell had been as exasperated as anyone about the Penguins' collective shootout futility, but he told me Sid's goal relaxed him a little:

"I know if I score, it's over, so I can just go out and if I don't score, we get another chance," he'd reply. "So, for me, it was a win-win situation."

As for the shot that sent everyone home happy, when I brought this up, he'd simply say: "I hit my spot. Everything that I was looking to happen ... happened."

Wait, what?

I'd revisit this with him a little later and got the following explanation: He'd studied some video on Hellebuyck and had been convinced that, if he held the puck out to his right on the forehand, he'd eventually see Hellebuyck drop to one knee. Which he did:

And at which point Rakell pounced by ripping it right through that new opening.

(Notice, by the way, Hellebuyck raising his head to the heavens as he skates off.)

Look, it's a little ridiculous that anyone would waste analysis on a shootout. But let's not pretend it hasn't been a preeminent variable in the Penguins' season to date, if not their overall psyche. Their shooters had been stopped in 10 of their previous 11 attempts -- only Ben Kindel had converted among those -- and their goaltenders hadn't fared any better.

Arturs Silovs had an abhorrent showing through regulation of this game, and it would've been a safe bet that he'd be beaten by the great Hellebuyck in the shootout ... except that Scott Arniel, the Jets' coach, sent out fellow septuagenarians Jonathan Toews and Gustav Nyquist, while never utilizing prime-of-their-career snipers Mark Scheifele or Kyle Connor.

My friend Mike McIntyre of the Winnipeg Free Press asked Arniel about those choices, and Arniel replied that the Jets wanted new faces since they'd struggled on shootouts.

Dude. They'd been 1-3 in shootouts. That's, like, so October.