Amid the euphoria Pittsburgh feels as its football team readies itself for the Super Bowl, the Steel City’s sports fans also suffered a painful loss yesterday, as Penguins legend Mario Lemieux announced his retirement – again.

The announcement came less than a week after the team’s 40-year-old player-owner made public his intentions to sell the franchise, and two months after he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat that can cause his pulse to flutter wildly and must be controlled by medication. Lemieux also retired after the 1996-97 season following years of back problems and a 1993 cancer scare, but he returned midway through the 2000-01 season and has played since. But he has again fought through injuries – including two major hip problems – that caused him to miss most of the 2001-02 and 2003-04 seasons.

“If I could still play this game I would be on the ice,” Lemieux said at a press conference yesterday in Pittsburgh.

Lemieux’s announcement was a sad end to one of the greatest careers in NHL history, and also ominously foreshadowed the end of the Penguins’ stay in Pittsburgh. Though the team won two Stanley Cups in the early 1990s, it became apparent when the city built new stadiums for its football and baseball teams in recent years that the Penguins are a secondary priority. The Pens play in the antiquated Mellon Arena – known affectionately as the “Igloo” – and are unable to generate enough revenue to compete with teams that play in modern buildings replete with luxury boxes and other 21st century amenities.

***

From the moment he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1984 and scored a goal on the first shift of his first game, Lemieux was anointed the team’s savior, and he followed through on that promise time and again. In addition to leading the Penguins to Stanley Cup titles in 1991 and 1992, he also put together a statistical body of work – 1,723 points on 690 goals and 1,033 assists in 915 career games – rivaled only by Wayne Gretzky. Lemieux won the Art Ross Trophy, given to the league’s leading scorer on six separate occasions, and won the Hart Trophy as the league’s MVP three times.

As extraordinary as Lemieux’s statistical accomplishments, his capacity to rebound from catastrophic illness and injury was even more impressive. In January of 1993, “Super Mario” was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease; just one day after completing a month long radiation treatment program, he scored a goal in his first game back.

The following season, he missed 58 games with a severe back injury, and he didn’t suit up for the lockout-shortened 1994-95 season. Still, Lemieux didn’t to miss a beat when he returned in the fall of 1996, scoring 161 points in just 70 games to win his third and final Hart Trophy.

After Lemieux announced his first retirement in the spring of 1997, the NHL waived its mandatory three-year waiting period and immediately inducted him into the hockey Hall of Fame. In September 1999, he took ownership of the Penguins, a maneuver that made it possible for him to collect on the $30 million in deferred salary that he was owed and save the franchise from bankruptcy.

Just over a year later, Lemieux announced he would be returning to the ice to play for the Penguins. He scored three points in his first game back following a three-season layoff. In typical Lemieux fashion, he proceeded to lead the Penguins all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals.

***

Perhaps Lemieux wasn’t meant to save hockey in Pittsburgh. Many believe he should have actually been the property of the Devils, and that the Penguins only secured his draft rights by intentionally losing games at the end of the 1983-84 season. And now, with the announcement that his playing career and his tenure as the Penguins’ owner is coming to an end, it seems all but certain the team will be relocated.

There was some murmuring toward the end of last year that a gaming bill would be passed to allow the Penguins to finance a new arena through the construction of a casino. But Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell is believed to be in support of a different gaming bid that does not involve a new arena for the Penguins. The team has partnered with a casino company that is promising to build the Penguins a new $290 million arena if it obtains a slot machine parlor license for downtown Pittsburgh, but there appears to be little hope the team will stay if there is no new arena. One reason Lemieux is selling is because he doesn’t want to be the owner who takes the team from Pittsburgh.

And so the Penguins’ stay in Pittsburgh appears to be on borrowed time. Five cities have emerged as possible destinations for the franchise – Kansas City, Houston, Las Vegas, Winnipeg, and Toronto – and no matter where the franchise moves, the new city’s victory will be Pittsburgh’s loss.

The Penguins – who have lost 10 straight games to fall to 11-29-9 – are in the midst of an atrocious season, but their future remains bright. With Sidney Crosby and Marc-Andre Fleury emerging as top-tier talents – and with uber-prospect Evgeni Malkin on the way – this could turn out to be a repeat of what took place when the Quebec Nordiques relocated to Denver, and won a Stanley Cup in their first season in Colorado.

“I also realized that the new NHL is really for the young guys, and I think we have a lot of them now in the league,” Lemieux said. “Some young guys that are dominating – we have a few here in Pittsburgh – and I think these young guys are really the future of the NHL.”

One of Lemieux’s greatest skills as a player was his ability seemingly to slow time. While everyone else on the ice appeared to be moving at a frenetic clip, the ever graceful Lemieux set the pace of the game, deliberately controlling the action every time he took to the ice.

But no one can elude the grasp of time, not even “Super Mario,” and so when he found that he no longer had the physical skills to dominate, and that injuries were robbing him of his ability to compete, his stellar career finally reached its inevitable conclusion.

Gretzky may have compiled more gaudy statistics, but Mario Lemieux was the most talented player ever to lace up skates. Had he maintained a clean bill of health for 20 years, there is little doubt he would have gone down as the greatest player of all time. And as it stands, his combination of skill, achievement, and perseverence still make him one of the most impressive athletes of our time.

Mr. Greenstein is the editor-in-chief of InsideHockey.com.