The celebration of the Penguins' latest Stanley Cup championship is starting to wind down.
A little bit, anyway.
But the impact of that title _ the franchise's fourth since 1991 _ likely will be felt throughout Western Pennsylvania for years to come.
Each of the Penguins' previous three Cups sparked a surge of interest and participation in youth hockey around the region, and there's no reason to think this time will be any different.
"The younger fans have latched on during these runs, and then they want to start to play hockey," said James Santilli, vice president of marketing for the Penguins.
Evidence, he said, can be found in the wake of the Penguins' Cup victory seven years ago.
"The five-year growth after the (2009) Cup, we had a 120 percent increase in USA Hockey registration for kids 10 and under," Santilli said. "That led the country, by far."
There are, he said, more than two dozen youth hockey associations in Western Pennsylvania, spread all over the region.
That wasn't always the case. Hockey was a niche sport around here before the Penguins drafted Mario Lemieux in 1984, and interest spiked after he led them to Cups in 1991 and 1992.
"We saw the (construction) boom after the 1991 Cup, with all the rinks that came about," Santilli said.
But even though the likes of Lemieux, Ron Francis and Jaromir Jagr, among others, inspired countless young players to take up the game a quarter-century ago, Santilli said the game's roots still didn't run as deep as they do now. The urge to play hockey, he said, simply didn't come naturally to a lot of young athletes in Western Pennsylvania.
"We did a lot of research in 2007 and 2008 and what we learned _ it shouldn't have been surprising _ was that hockey wasn't a native sport to the area," he said.
"When you grew up here, you grew up playing Little League (baseball). Everyone played Little League. And everyone knows the game of football, whether you played football or not, just because of the Steelers.
"You grew up watching on Sundays, with your parents or grandparents. That wasn't the case, when it came to hockey. It certainly wasn't the case before 1984. When Mario got here, he put hockey on the map in Western Pennsylvania, and then the Cups (in 1991 and 1992) helped to grow that."
Having the Penguins win a third Cup in 2009 proved to be the perfect bridge between the generation of young players drawn to hockey by Lemieux and Co. and the one attracted by the clubs Sidney Crosby has captained.
"The perfect storm was the amount of time between Cups," Santilli said. "The 2009 Cup, a lot of those people who were young or teenagers during those '91 and '92 Cups, now they have families of their own and they were introducing their kids to the Penguins.
"It's perfect timing. The people who grew up with Mario, their children are growing up with Sidney Crosby, (Evgeni) Malkin, (Kris) Letang, (Marc-Andre) Fleury and this new generation (of Penguins players)."
The Penguins introduced a "Learn to Play" program for boys and girls 8-and-under in 2009, outfitting participants with all the necessary equipment at no charge.
"We drastically reduced the (financial) barrier to entry into the sport," Santilli said.
Since then, roughly 7,200 kids have gone through the program, and many have stuck with hockey.
"After that one year, about 50 percent stay on to play organized hockey," Santilli said. "And after they do stay on, it's close to 95 percent. So we've introduced probably close to 4,000 new hockey players into the market."
