There’s a photo I keep in my mind. Maybe you do, too.
It’s Mario Lemieux, number 66, gliding across the ice like a song. No one skated like him. No one moved so quietly, so commandingly. He didn’t just play hockey. He rescued it.
He rescued Pittsburgh, too.
Twice.
Once as a player, when he came back from cancer, back from a bad back, back from everything but defeat. And then again, when he stepped out of his skates and into a suit, buying the team he once carried on his shoulders, saving it from bankruptcy with little more than loyalty, belief, and that easy Mario grace.
Now we hear that he might want to do it again.
According to local and national reports, there are whispers. Rumblings. Lemieux wants to buy back the Penguins—his Penguins. The team that lost its way, lost its soul, perhaps, and now might get a second chance. And I can’t help but hope.
Not because I think he’s the only man who can save the franchise. Again. But because I believe he’s the only one who would never let it get lost.
This isn’t about business. It’s about belonging.
The Penguins are not just a franchise. They’re a chapter in a story Pittsburgh tells about itself: a story of grit and glory, of steel and stubbornness, of rising again and again. Nobody embodied that more than Lemieux. When he played, the city cheered. When he got sick, the city wept. When he returned, the city stood up and roared.
And when he stepped in to save the franchise, he did it not for headlines, but for home.
Because Pittsburgh was his. And he was ours.
You don’t need to be a hockey fan to understand that. You just need to understand what it feels like to belong to something, and to feel like it belongs to you.
That’s what’s been missing.
And that’s why I hope, deeply, selfishly, sentimentally, that Mario comes back.
Not just because he knows what it takes to win. But because he remembers what it means to care.
We talk a lot about legacy in sports. But legacy isn’t what you leave behind. It’s what you carry forward.
Mario Lemieux has carried us forward before.
Maybe, just maybe, he’s ready to do it again.
