The Penguins' window has closed.
No, not exactly.
More like it has been slammed shut.
Hard enough that it shattered.
Anyone who can't see that at this point must have caught one of the shards in the eye.
Which is probably a lot what it felt like for the Penguins to have their season ended so abruptly by Montreal Friday, as the Canadiens defeated them, 2-0, in Game 4 of their qualifying-round series at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto.
A week ago, the Penguins were prohibitive favorites to advance to Round 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Instead, they'll settle for a consolation prize: A 12.5 percent chance to land the No. 1 choice in the 2020 NHL Draft, which would allow them to secure the rights to winger Alexis Lafreniere in Phase 2 of the draft lottery, set for Monday at 6 p.m.
Some scouts view Lafreniere as a generational talent, the kind of guy who could be the centerpiece of a franchise for a lot of years.
The Penguins have had a few of those on their payroll over the past three-plus decades.
The two still there, Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, figured prominently in the Stanley Cups the Penguins won in 2009, 2016 and 2017, but couldn't prevent them from being run out of the postseason by a mediocre team that finished 15 points behind the Penguins during the regular season.
And it's not as if what happened against the Canadiens was an aberration: The Penguins have lost nine out of their past 10 postseason games.
That's not a fluke; it's a trend, to say nothing of a winning percentage of .100. How many championships do you think that will get ya?
And with much of the core of this team -- guys like Crosby and Malkin and Kris Letang -- moving into their mid-30s, there's precious little reason to believe they will be going on any lengthy playoff runs in the near future, although Mike Sullivan disputed that notion in the moments after the Montreal series ended.
"I don't believe that," he said. "I think these guys are still elite players. I believe in this core. I just think they're such character guys. They're elite hockey players and I still think there's elite play left in them. That's just what I believe. Obviously, at some point, everybody's window closes, so you could argue that with any team in the league. But I strongly believe this group has a lot of hockey (left)."
If so, perhaps it's because the Penguins didn't leave all that much on the ice Friday afternoon.
They didn't play poorly, but neither did they play like a team fully committed to keeping its season alive, regardless of the sacrifices that required.
"We needed our best tonight," Sullivan said. "And we didn't get it."
The Montreal series -- as well as the sweep by the Islanders in 2019, and the second-round loss to the Capitals a year before that -- doesn't detract from what this core accomplished for it was, to be sure, an exceptional run.
One that yielded those three Cups, some indelible memories and the opportunity to watch the likes of Crosby, Malkin and Marc-Andre Fleury engrave their credentials for induction to the Hockey Hall of Fame with excellence.
But make no mistake, it's over.
The era when the Penguins could enter every season confident that they could seriously contend for a championship the following spring -- or summer, in the event of a pandemic -- has passed.
They claimed a prominent spot among the NHL's elite franchises for more than a decade, but Time -- which is undefeated since, well, the beginning -- finally has caught up with them.
Just as it did with the Penguins of the early 1990s, or the Steelers of the late 1970s.
Just as it has with every dominant team or player, in every sport.
Always has. Always will.
It didn't look as if that necessarily would be the case early in the qualifying round. The Penguins played very well in the opener, a 3-2 overtime loss, and were almost as good in Game 2, a 3-1 victory.
"I thought Game 1, we played really well," Crosby said. "We came out hard and obviously, to play as well as we did and get as many chances, to lose that one, that hurts, but it happens in the playoffs."
Trouble is, peaking early rarely is a good idea. Especially if you do it in a defeat.
But the series didn't get away from the Penguins until Game 3, when they squandered a 3-1 lead by playing much of the game with the urgency of a heavily sedated basset hound.
"Things kind of swung in their favor with them being able to come back in that game," Crosby said.
That performance prompted Sullivan to make a couple of personnel moves Friday -- he replaced goalie Matt Murray with Tristan Jarry and returned Jared McCann to the lineup after making him a healthy scratch for Game 3 -- but the switches didn't have a profound impact. Neither did reconfiguring his forward combinations by moving right wingers Bryan Rust, Patric Hornqvist and Conor Sheary onto different lines.
The Penguins launched only 22 shots at Canadiens goalie Carey Price, who again got a good look at most of them. Jarry, making his NHL postseason debut, played well, stopping everything that came his way until Artturi Lehkonen capped a sequence that began with a Brandon Tanev turnover by pushing in a shot from the front lip of the crease at 15:49 of the third period to give Montreal the only goal it would need.
"Both teams played pretty tight," Crosby said. "There were some chances on both sides. And they got one late."
And when Shea Weber scored into an empty net with 31.8 seconds remaining in regulation, the game -- as well as the Penguins' season, and perhaps the most successful era in franchise history -- effectively was over.
The Penguins, quite properly, praised Price, and the team in front of him for pulling off an upset few outside of their immediate families thought was possible.
"We faced a well-balanced team with a great goaltender that played better than us," Letang said.
That doesn't mean the Canadiens, commendable as their showing was, won the series as much as the Penguins lost it.
"We did some good things," Crosby said. "Did we do enough? No. Give them credit. They played really well and got some big plays throughout the four games."
The kind of series-altering plays that guys like Crosby and Malkin and Letang used to produce with remarkable regularity.
But while Crosby had a point in each of the first three games -- including the Penguins' first goal in Games 1 and 2 -- Malkin managed only one assist and Letang was scoreless in the series.
And the next time they get into the playoffs -- assuming the Penguins qualify in 2021 -- all three will be the better part of another year older.
That does not bode well for a return to the days when they made the Penguins a fixture on the short list of serious Cup contenders every time the postseason approached, even though Letang insisted the veteran nucleus has a few runs left in it.
"I think we still believe in the core group of this team," he said. "I think we have a lot in the tank. We're going to keep playing hard and give everything for the Penguins. We have to be better. This year, we didn't play good enough to win, but I feel comfortable with the group of guys we have."
Which means it might be a good time for Letang -- and everyone else in the organization -- to look out that closed window and recognize how the playoff landscape has changed.
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