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Columbus Blue Jackets' 20-year-old prodigy Ryan Johansen (left) celebrates second-period 5-on-3 power-play goal with Artem Anisimov that cut Pittsburgh's lead to 3-2.

(AP/Jay LaPrete)

I have a feeling today that, down deep, a city full of Pittsburgh hockey fans wish they could switch teams. Maybe the older ones wish they could switch eras and turn back the clock a quarter-century to the Igloo and the young Mario and even Gene Ubriaco before Bob Johnson arrived to herald the beginnings of that great early ‘90s run.

Or even maybe back to Eddie Shack and Pierre Larouche in the ‘70s when the franchise was still fresh and new and any meager success was glorious.

Too far back to even remember? Maybe.

But Pittsburghers can certainly remember last October and what happened at PNC Park with their Pirates. And what they’re witnessing 180 miles down I-70 is as close to that as anything you can find in the NHL or pro sports in general. It's so rare anymore.

Their Penguins are being seriously challenged by – c’mon, really? – the Columbus Blue Jackets. After last night’s 4-3 overtime win by the Jackets, this first-round Stanley Cup Playoffs series is tied 2-2.

That’s the Pens, team of the world’s greatest player Sidney Crosby and loaded with goal-scoring stars such as Evgeni Malkin and Chris Kunitz and James Neal.

Being played dead-even by a franchise so inert in its 14 years of existence that the head football coach at the local college said just recently on an Atlanta talk show that Southern boys should come to Columbus to play for him because, among other reasons, the town has no pro sports to compete for attention.

The Pens were booed at the end of a Game 2 loss on their home ice in CONSOL Energy Center.

The Jackets were cheered immediately after falling behind 3-0 last night in a Game 4 they ended up winning 4-3.

Every final score in this series has been 4-3. In every game, the winner has reeled in a 3-1 deficit.

It’s the kind of series an upstart franchise with buoyant fans loves and the kind an established franchise with heritage and positioned superstars hates.

Outside of Pittsburgh, which is in full panic mode, everyone pretty much thinks the Penguins will get serious now, Crosby and Malkin will bust loose, they’ll win Game 5 at home by something like 6-2 and survive the series in six or seven games.

I agree. It makes sense. The Pens are just better. Even with Marc Andre Fleury susceptible as he is to his goofy playoff aneurysms.

But that gets to the seed of this nagging problem for Pittsburgh – the city and the team: They are expected to win. What’s going on now is unanticipated first-round drudgery. Even considering how disappointing the Pens have been in the playoffs since their 2009 Stanley Cup, it wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Not in the first round. Not against these guys.

And, man, the other side – both the team and the city – is just happy to be at the table and getting fed. They are ravenous, they are happy, they are loving life right now. And they won’t go away. The Jackets have three 20-to-21-year-old budding stars in Ryan Johansen, Boone Jenner and Ryan Murray. They have a good goaltender in former Flyer and 2013 Vezina Trophy winner Sergei Bobrovsky.

And they have mostly otherwise a kennel full of mutts who dump and chase and crack heads on the boards and compete with the tenacity of guard dogs. They just don’t give a damn. They and their fans are having a blast, free of mandate. It won’t ever be like this again.

Nick Foligno celebrates his game-winning goal with Columbus goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky.

Sports are so full of joy when it’s like this. When after an interminable drought, suddenly the skies open up and you’re laughing and playing in the glorious rain and rolling around mindlessly in the mud thinking, hey, win or lose, how much fun is this?

Nothing about this can be fun for the Penguins, least of all Crosby, Malkin and coach Dan Bylsma. Neither of the duo has scored in four games. Bylsma, in a very apparent reaction to the pressure he feels called them out in a largely unprecedented challenge this afternoon: “They’re our best players. We need more from our whole team. We need more from them.”

Bylsma then ripped his team's lack of energy: “I think the work and compete and the battle level has probably been the most troubling thing from our team. It’s got to be raised back up to a level that is necessary this time of year in this type of hockey and playoff hockey.”

The Blue Jackets have zero such expectations hung around their necks and are playing free and easy. They are embodied by a Pittsburgh kid named R.J. Umberger, the onetime Philadelphia Flyer and Phantom who had a Mario poster over his bed, has a scholastic award named after him in Pittsburgh and who played college hockey at Ohio State. He understands both towns in depth.

It was Umberger who took a dive last night to stop a Penguins shot in OT, avoided it hitting a previous gash in his cheek only because he raised his glove to protect it, got up to go to the bench and saw the puck delivered by ricochet chance to his stick near the red line. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted teammate Nick Foligno heading up ice, dropped a blind pass to his tape and watched Foligno wrist a 50-footer inexplicably past a frozen Fleury.

I grew up and lived the first 32 years of my life in or near Columbus. In all the years of selling Coke in Ohio Stadium and St. John Arena, attending OSU games as a kid, teenager and young adult, I have never seen or heard a Columbus fan base react to a single sporting event score as I did last night. Nothing in the city’s sports history compares to it, not even the 1968 and 2002 national championship football teams, for one reason: It was so unexpected. The joy it unleashed was so free of the gravity of consequence.

Blue Jackets fans are a breed apart from Ohio State and that in itself is so refreshing. They remind me of the loyal core base that witnessed Penn State basketball unthinkably surge to the 2001 NCAA tournament Sweet 16. They have lived with arrogant mismanagement through the Doug MacLean years, they have endured 14 years of pretty much nonstop failure. One playoff series in all that time (2009), a sweep at the hands of the Detroit Red Wings and for that they gave their Jackets a standing ovation afterward.

It all reminds you of gorgeous PNC Park and the Clemente Bridge, silent witnesses to two decades of squalor. That is why “CBJ! CBJ!” rang out among the 19,000 fans in one of America’s most beautifully designed unrecognized sports arenas when the Jackets trailed 3-0 last night late in the first period. It was so much like that single-game playoff the Pirates played against the Reds. The starved Jacket faithful were not just loyal but defiant in their support. They willed their team to unfathomable heights.

“The fans were unbelievable,” defenseman Jack Johnson told Mike Arace of The Columbus Dispatch. “They stuck right with us. [The Penguins] scored their third goal, and they were chanting ‘CBJ!’

“As a fan, I don’t think they completely understand the energy it gives us when they stick with us like that.”

And that’s what Pittsburgh is fighting now – the lack of a burden and weight on the Blue Jackets that each of the Pens, in contrast, certainly bear like 100-pound harnesses.

“Oh, this feels good,” Umberger told Arace after the locker room had emptied. “These fans so deserved this, given what they’ve been through the last decade-plus.

“Man, it was exciting. Is anybody going to sleep between now and Game 5? I don’t think I can.”

That will be Saturday night. Two more days for one team to stew in frustration and the other to bask in possibility.

Who knows what happens next?

DAVID JONES: djones@pennlive.com.