Yes, I'm well aware that baseball's post-season has started.  I'm also well aware that the NFL has hit the quarter pole rounding towards the back stretch.  These are two things that have most sports fans drooling, and this part of the year is simply the best part of the sports year, in my opinion, bar none.  Only adding to that is the start of the hockey season.

You have to watch the game of hockey played at its highest level to begin to appreciate it.  There's no sport that can turn so quickly - a giveaway leading to an instant goal, for instance, is one of the most exciting plays in all of sport.  No other game except perhaps football can turn so quickly.  Even football's best, most exciting plays, don't happen as fast.  The momentum turns and the game changes completely - in any sport - when something like that happens.  But hockey is the fastest - you go from trying to get the puck out of your own end to down a goal (or another goal...or allowing the tying goal) in 1.2 seconds.  In football, the only thing that happens in 1.2 seconds is the start of the play.

Hockey is a sport that combines many different elements.  You like toughness?  Watch a defenseman bang the boards in his own end trying to get the puck from the forward.  You like speed?  Watch someone like Alexander Ovechkin skate through an entire defense.  You like grace?  Watch a hockey goalie absolutely steal a would-be goal.  Try watching hockey one night or two nights.  Watch the ebb and flow of the game, and how the game is played.  I think that soon, even non-fans can learn to appreciate the game.  No other game is quite as watchable, and utterly demands all of your attention like hockey.  You can take a moment in a football or baseball game to grab a sandwich a lot of times, especially if the game is a tight one.  You can't in hockey - you might miss that 1.2 seconds of the game that changes the entire feel of it.

In Pittsburgh, fans of hockey are drooling, and ready to hit the Mellon Arena in droves to watch hockey's best player.  Pittsburgh fans have been completely spoiled, because they've had the best or second-best player in the entire league playing at home for 41 nights a year since 1986.  That, by the way, was the year Mario Lemiuex first hit the ice, and scored his first goal during his first shift in his first game.  Quite an audacious beginning, and it was only the start.  Lemieux's Pens won two Stanley Cups in the early nineties, and if anything it could have been one of the worst things for the sport.  The game was popular, and expansion occurred, leading to teams with less skill and speed, and in a way to defense the speed and skill of the Pens and Gretzky's Oilers and Kings, teams developed the neutral-zone trap defense, still the worst creation in all of hockey ever.  Period.  Now that the rules have been retooled to allow more offensive wizardry, the game is again growing, and you should take note.

The Penguins will have one of the league's deepest, most dangerous teams.  They have questions - most importantly the team's goaltending depth is questioned, as is the experience level of the blue liners on defense.  What no one questions is the team's offensive skill.  When you roll Sidney Crosby (the game's best player, and this after only 2 years in the league), a center that would be a top-line player on any other team (Russian Evengi Malkin) and a second-year player that plays with grit, determination and (oh, by the way) has a deft scoring touch in Jordan Staal this team has it all.  Add in wicked shots from a couple defensemen, especially those quite gifted at quarterbacking the power play, and you have a team with an offense that few, if any, teams will be able to shut down.  The Penguins have an embarrassment of riches right now, and there's little question they'll be among the NHL's best teams by the end of the season.  They showed a 48 point increase last year.  Absolutely no one expects them to do that again - that would be a record to beat all records - but envisioning them winning the President's Cup (the team with the most points all season long) is not all that far-fetched.  Neither is expecting this team to hoist Lord Stanley's Cup at the end of the year.

Personally, I think the Pens are still perhaps a year away from winning the Cup.  I think they need, as a team, to get another solid year of play by their goalies, and allow their defense to grow another year.  I think they'll probably reach the Conference Finals, and maybe even the Stanley Cup finals.  But winning it?  That's a tougher stretch, only because they are so young.  That might work both ways - being so young they might not feel the same kind of pressure that veternas do.  But they could implode under the pressure just as easily.  Another year of seasoning will make this team even more dangerous, and there's no reason to expect them to falter this or next year.

For the NHL, this signals tough times, watching a young team, managed exceptionally well under the salary cap, blossom into a truly elite team.  For Penguins fans...things couldn't be better.