penguins 8, flyers 2

Aside, of course, from scoring the most points in an NHL season for an 18-year old in league history and selling tens of thousands of tickets, one great thing Sidney Crosby did for the Penguins in his rookie year was to resurrect the team's rivalry with the Flyers. It had languished for a couple of years while the Pens bottom-fed. Oh, sure, the local crowds still felt the same antipathy for the guys in orange and black, but it wasn't much of a fight. But last year Ken Hitchcock drove the Crosby's-a-diver bandwagon, and Derian Hatcher put his coach's taunts into composite form by repeatedly bludgeoning Crosby and truncating a tooth or two of the kid's. Sid responded by filling the net with the puck. Over and over.

Last night, he picked up from where he left off last year. The third goal of his hat trick was both poetry and irony. I'm still waiting for it to show up on Youtube (Internet Search-and-Retrieve Team: ACTIVATE!) and will post it here when it shows up. In brief, Hatcher gets control of the puck in front of his own net and starts to skate it out. He's looking to make a pass. In the blink of an eye, Crosby swoops in from behind, lifts his stick and backhands the puck into the net and past an unprepared Robert Esche in one motion. Hatcher never looked so old or leaden-footed.