For the Penguins, it is a distant -- and presumably unpleasant -- memory.
For Montreal, it is a template.
And perhaps a source of optimism for the Canadiens, as they begin to prepare for a best-of-five preliminary-round series against the Penguins, who will be heavily favored to win it and advance to the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The Canadiens' 4-1 victory at PPG Paints Arena Dec. 10 reflected the confluence of quality goaltending, responsible team defense, opportunistic scoring and an uninspired effort by their opposition.
Whether all of those factors will be replicated once, let alone enough times for Montreal to survive the series, is conjecture, but that game should be a cautionary tale for the Penguins.
It began well enough for them, as Jake Guentzel capped a two-on-zero break with Bryan Rust to give them a 1-0 lead at 2:59 of the opening period, but that was the only one of their 34 shots that Canadiens goalie Carey Price failed to stop.
And after Tomas Tatar ended Tristan Jarry's franchise-record shutout streak at 177 minutes, 15 seconds, Joel Armia, Shea Weber and Brendan Gallagher scored to give Montreal a fairly comfortable victory at a place where the Penguins had gone 8-0-2 in their previous 10 games.
Afterward, Mike Sullivan suggested Montreal had been more willing to compete than his team, a criticism he rarely leveled in 2019-20.
That's just one of the things that made the game one of the sort the Penguins preferred to forget as quickly as possible. And, based on Sullivan's response when asked about the game during a conference call, it apparently worked, at least in his case.
"I'm trying to remember Dec. 10," he said. "What I can tell you is, my guess is that on Dec. 10, Montreal played better than we did, and that's why they won. We're going through a process, as a coaching staff, right now of pre-scouting Montreal and looking at their most recent games and watching some of our games that we played against them.
"As a coaching staff, we're always cautious about going back too far in the season, because personnel changes and subtle things to their tactics change. We try to stay with the most recent events, and that's the process we've gone through."
Still, it won't be a surprise if someone on the staff studies video of that loss -- as well as the Penguins' 3-2 victory at Bell Centre Jan. 4 and their 4-1 decision at home Feb. 14 -- until his eyeballs threaten to bleed, searching for something about the Canadiens that can be exploited during the series.
While there is no way to predict how teams will respond to being in high-stakes games after not playing since March, Sullivan predicted that the quality of the competition will be higher than some skeptics fear.
"I think the level of play will be competitive," he said. "There may be an adjustment process in the early part of the (resumption) of play, but I don't think it's going to take the players long to find their timing and their touch.
"There's a lot to play for. These guys are proud guys. They're the best players in the world, and I think a lot of them see the opportunity in front of them."
How the teams perform when the games begin will be rooted, at least in part, in the preparations scheduled to begin when training camps open July 10. Sullivan again stressed that this camp will be unlike others, because the emphasis will be on getting his team ready for games, not assembling a roster and figuring out how and where personnel can be deployed most effectively.
"The primary objective is to prepare our team for playoff competition," he said. "The logistics and the circumstances are very different from coming into a training camp in September, at the beginning of a season when you have an 82-game schedule in front of you.
"We're going to put our guys through game simulations. We'll have intra-squad games throughout the course of training camp to make sure we give our guys an opportunity to feel the game-day scenario and put their bodies through the process so that we can try to help with that transition back into that competitive mindset that's so necessary to have success in this league."
And to avoid nights like the one the Penguins had Dec. 10.
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