Patric Hornqvist works away from Colin McDonald behind the Islanders’ net Saturday. — GETTY IMAGES

DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS

Football players can’t be taught to hit hard. You hear that from Pop Warner all the way up to the pros. They’ve either been doing it their whole lives, they either love doing it, or they never will.

The most common baseball variation relates to a pitcher throwing inside. If he isn’t backing off batters by Little League, he’ll never do so in the bigs.

And hockey’s?

“No one learns how to go to the net,” Eddie Johnston was telling me late Saturday night after the Penguins’ 3-1 throwdown of the previously perfect Islanders at Consol Energy Center. “I’ve been around the game my whole life, and I’ve never seen a player who you could tell to go to the net, and he’d be good at it. Not one.”

E.J.’s seen his share of hockey, to say the least.

And he knows exactly what he sees when watching Patric Hornqvist.

“He lives there. He loves it. You can’t get him away from there.”

The net, he means.

“A guy like that … boy, that’s what we needed.”

Who could dispute it after this one?

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Pascal Dupuis is struck in the upper back by a shot near the Dallas crease Thursday night. — GETTY

DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS

Sometimes it really isn’t about strategy or sweat or even an egregious Evgeni Malkin giveaway.

Sure, the Penguins turned what felt like the safest possible one-goal lead against a sleepy Dallas squad into a stunning 3-2 loss Thursday night at Consol Energy Center — Jamie Benn scored with 2:57 left, Tyler Seguin with just 2.9 seconds left — and it left all concerned pretty sour.

“In the third, they were down one and started coming a little harder and … we probably made it a little too easy on them,” Sidney Crosby said. He was one of four players to show for the media availability, which only continued the silence that essentially defined the evening. “But still, to not even get a point out of that, it’s a little frustrating.”

No doubt. And all I’ll add to actual hockey analysis is this: Malkin’s turnover at the attacking blue line led to a Seguin breakaway that led to a waved-off goal that led to Lindy Ruff and the Stars fuming that led to their guys finally emerging from a fog that led to Benn’s goal that led to Crosby needlessly yanking down Benn with 10 seconds left that led to Seguin’s power-play goal on a one-timer that looked eminently stoppable on Marc-Andre Fleury’s part that led to more questions about a penalty-killing unit that’s been the lowlight of the Penguins’ early going.

And that’s it.

Because, if you ask me, all of this was really about Pascal Dupuis.

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PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION — ALEX MESSMER

DEJAN KOVACEVIC, DK ON PITTSBURGH SPORTS

It was April 28, and Brandon Sutter sat pretty much stone-faced at his stall in Columbus’ cramped visitors’ locker room. Unlaced his skates. Exchanged a couple pleasantries with teammates. Not much else. And not much different, really, than any of his fellow Penguins, all locked in a drop-dead-serious Stanley Cup playoff series at the time.

But, man, where it concerned Sutter specifically, it was nothing less than diametrically different than a year earlier on Long Island.

The chin was up, not sunk at the chest.

The eyes were focused, not glazed.

“It’s not easy the first time you do anything,” he’d tell me that morning after I failed to find a polite way to ask what had gotten into him since essentially folding in 2013. “I didn’t really get that playoff experience when I played in Carolina, so that was my first. But the people I talked to after that just told me to be myself, to play my game. Don’t try to do more. So when I got to playing well late in this season, that’s what I wanted to have as my mindset. Just keep going.”

Just keep going?

Uh-uh, sorry, there had to have been something else, something more. Because what played out in that postseason wasn’t just Sutter’s five goals in 13 games or team-best plus-7 rating. It was that Sutter … well, Rob Scuderi described it beautifully Wednesday at Consol Energy Center: “He was our best overall forward in the playoffs.”

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