The Penguins were never better off than on the last day of 2010.

The team had taken over the Steelers' stadium, where an outdoor ice rink glistened under a bright winter sun. Sidney Crosby, then only 23, looked forever young. Fresh off a 25-game scoring streak, the longest by an NHL player in 18 years, he was charging toward a hat trick of presumptive honors as the likely MVP, scoring champion and goal king.

The Penguins, subtly reconfigured by general manager Ray Shero during the previous summer, were rolling. So were HBO's cameras, which turned coach Dan Bylsma into a star in the weeks leading up to the Winter Classic that CEO/president David Morehouse pitched the league to bring to Pittsburgh.

Not even injuries to Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal, two-thirds of the indomitable Big Three center blueprint, could prevent the march of these Penguins. Mario Lemieux, the player-turned-owner-turned-icon, seemed to sense as much as he joked with reporters after gathering with former teammates and opponents for an alumni game.

A threat of rain the next day forced the NHL to move the Classic from New Year's afternoon to evening. That opening night of 2011 was when everything changed for a franchise seemingly poised to penetrate hockey history.

Fifty-three months after David Steckel blindsided Crosby near the end of the second period during the Classic, Lemieux and fellow majority co-owner Ron Burkle are exploring options that could include selling the Penguins. A lot had to happen, most of it unforeseen, to get to this point.

Crosby concussion

The infamous hit by Steckel on Crosby triggered an unforeseeable descent precipitated by an unpredictable injury in the form of Crosby's concussion. At his peak — Crosby had posted 32 goals and 64 points in 40 games — the NHL's best player was cut down during his best season, and he was lost until deep into his next one. Including the playoffs, Crosby played in only 42 of the Penguins' next 137 games.

When finally ready to return, not to playing but playing like the dominant player of his era, Crosby was 25, near the historical end of prime age for hockey players. And then there was no hockey.

An NHL lockout wiped out 34 games of the 2012-13 season. Like all teams, the Penguins lost out on revenue from 17 home dates. Unlike most teams, the Penguins could have counted on sellouts for those dates.

Missing out on that revenue was a bitter pill to swallow for team owners who didn't believe in the lockout, as was evident by Burkle teaming with Crosby to try ending it in December 2012.

Long before then, Lemieux and Burkle established the Penguins would spend to the salary cap, believing Crosby and Malkin to be generational talents who could chase multiple titles. The Penguins nearly won the Stanley Cup in Year 2 of the Crosby/Malkin era. The Cup came in Year 3, and a second-round loss to Montreal in Year 4 was viewed mostly as a speed bump on the raceway to more titles.

In their fifth year together, Crosby and Malkin opened Consol Energy Center. It was to be their building, and Lemieux symbolically poured water from the ice at the old Civic Arena onto the new building's ice in the first regular-season game Oct. 7, 2010.

The Penguins lost that contest, perhaps fittingly because the 2010-11 season is when the losses would start to unexpectedly pile up.

Early exits

Neither Crosby (concussion) nor Malkin (knee) played in the 2011 playoffs, and the Penguins were bounced in Round 1 by Tampa Bay. Malkin returned with a career-defining season, winning a second scoring title and MVP, but somehow the Penguins lost their way when Crosby returned from his concussion about a month before the 2012 postseason. There, another first-round loss, to Philadelphia, left everybody with more questions than answers.

That summer, a question would be answered when Staal, Shero's first draft pick, forced a trade to Carolina after opting not to negotiate a new contract. The trade was consummated between Shero and Jim Rutherford, who later would replace Shero as Penguins GM, in an office at Consol Energy Center.

In Staal, the Penguins moved more than merely their No. 3 center. He was the club's third-best forward, forming a 1-2-3 punch down the middle that no opponent had proven capable of matching. From 2007-10, the Penguins never lost a playoff series during which Crosby, Malkin and Staal were healthy. In those years, the Penguins went 37-23 in playoff games that featured the Big Three centers.

Over their final two seasons together, as the Penguins' best players struggled to stay health, the Big Three played together in only six playoff games.

Coincidentally, that is the number of home playoff dates the Penguins began to budget to break even upon moving into the new arena. In its first three years, Consol Energy Center averaged only five home playoff dates per postseason.

To the general public, and even the players, the financial aspect of the Penguins' three-year slide from burgeoning dynasty to frequent flameout was not a story worth considering. Even after being swept from the Eastern Conference final by Boston in 2013, the Penguins re-signed Malkin, defenseman Kris Letang, wingers Chris Kunitz and Pascal Dupuis, and they even dipped into free agency to bring back defenseman Rob Scuderi.

All apparently was well.

However, all was about to turn sideways.

Staying the course

Backed by his owners, Shero tethered himself to Bylsma in June 2013, signing his coach to a two-year contract that matched the remaining term of his deal. They would go down together — well, within three weeks of one another — when the Penguins failed to return to the Cup Final for a fifth straight postseason in 2014.

Like the lockout, ownership did not enjoy the taste of continuously coming up short, especially considering the Penguins had spent well above the salary cap by continuing to spend to it during the stretches when Crosby, Malkin and Letang were not healthy from 2010-14.

Spending money is fine when things are fun. By last summer, things hadn't been fun around the Penguins for some time. Once the most exciting franchise in its sport, not to mention Pittsburgh, the hockey club had become stale and probably a bit burdensome to its greatest asset.

And the Penguins greatest asset always has been Lemieux.

Seeing clearly

In May 2006, Lemieux fired his friend, Craig Patrick. Eight years later, he fired Patrick's replacement, Shero.

Firing folks never is easy. Neither is winning the Cup, even if everything is in place.

Lemieux lifted it only twice as a player, even though he was among the best to play. Crosby handed it to him — a player-to-owner exchange among hockey heroes — June 12, 2009, when the Crosby/Malkin era was off to an unanticipated early sensational start.

At the time, the NHL was four years into having instituted a cap. Nobody knew the Penguins were best built to win when the bulk of their collection of first-round picks were on cheaper, entry-level contracts.

Then again, nobody could have predicted Crosby's concussion. And everybody hoped, blindly perhaps, the NHL would not lose more games to a labor dispute.

The Penguins never were better off than on the last day of 2010, but things changed quickly, and most of those things were uncontrollable.

There is only one thing the owners of a professional sports franchise can control: their exit.

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