Deep State purveyors of conspiracy theories must have been orgasmic early Sunday afternoon.

That’s when Alex Ovechkin blasted a puck into the net to become hockey’s all-time goal-scoring leader, against a backdrop of all things these professional liars use to prey on the weak-minded among us, mostly Democrats.

It’s a gift, I tell you, to have such a high-profile sports story with so many elements ripe to be twisted into the fodder conspiracy theory types love to peddle.

Begin with the fact that Ovechkin is a Russian! And he plays for a team based in Washington, D.C. Looks like a KGB plant to me.

How ironic this was considering the virtue signaling NHL had a Four Nations Faceoff tournament to replace the all-star game this season, an event that had teams of players from Canada, the United States, Sweden and Finland, but not Russia due to political concerns.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was greeted with his customary round of booing as the game was stopped Sunday for ceremonies to honor the Ovechkin milestone. Watching Bettman need to kiss Ovechkin’s a@# – ring – was priceless.

Maybe next year Russia gets to field a team for the NHL “Five” nations faceoff?

Sure, Ovechkin is a Putin supporter, but aren’t sports supposed to be above politics?

When Ovechkin scored for the 895^th time, on a powerplay, he supplanted the Great Wayne Gretzky, widely mentioned as the likely governor if and when Canada becomes our 51^st state.

If only the U.S. and Canada weren’t on the outs, we might have rushed to the aid of our northern neighbors who must be in mourning over having their national icon passed for the record.

In attendance to view the record firsthand was FBI director Kash Patel. Sure, he had a weak cover story of being a fan of the host New York Islanders. But Patel also had been on hand the previous game, when Ovechkin tied the record.

Are we to believe that Patel is just a fan of athletic greatness? When a Russian is involved? Of course not.

And Ovechkin scored off a Russian goalie. I see collusion, don’t you?

The crowd, mostly Islanders fans, actually cheered the Russian’s milestone. In a New York arena.

Cue Letitia James and Alvin Bragg. There must be some obscure statute they can prosecute these fans for violating. If not, we’ll just make up one that fits. Show me the man, I’ll show you the crime.

This was a threat to democracy as we know it, for sure. Worst I’ve seen in my lifetime. It was insurrection, cheering a Russian setting a record on American soil.

I expect a few hundred former intelligence officials to rush to publish an ad proclaiming this all was nothing more than Russian disinformation.

Somewhere, Karine Gay Paree is leafing through her binder for the proper verbiage to label alleged videos of the event “cheap fakes.”

Democrats in Congress, many of them on the Chinese payroll, will show their general ignorance by wondering aloud why a Chinese player was not deemed fit to break the record.

They also will be drawing up impeachment charges against Donald Trump, for the greatest security breach in the nation’s history, allowing a Russian to break the record on domestic soil, during Trump’s watch.

More Russia, Russia, Russia, Trump might respond.

But there are positives to all this.

Gretzky said his Russian grandfather would have been happy.

Putin, relieved of needing to monitor Ovechkin’s record progress, now can contemplate peace with Ukraine.

And Zelenskyy can plead for more U.S. financial aid to bolster his country’s hockey programs in order to keep pace with the Russians. A few hundred billion dollars should do.

From weather, to economics, to politics and beyond, there is a bleak tinge to life these days. Why should my NCAA Men’s Basketball bracket be any different?

Let us try to put a positive slant on something — my bracket. My eventual championship pick, Florida, remains alive, as we anticpate Monday night’s championship game.

It’s all downhill beyond that.

As I glance at the standings on CBSsports.com, I rank 641,517^th among entrants. I can’t easily find how many total entrants there are, but I would suspect a lot more than 641,517.

The good news is, I spent no money to enter this bracket contest, losing only pride as pick after pick fell by the wayside. It was supposed to be easy this year, with zero Cinderella teams and not a lot of surprises between the big guys.

Yes, I incorrectly I picked a lot of early upsets.

My bracket did better as we moved along. I had Florida and Auburn tabbed to meet in one Final Four game, with Florida winning. That happened.

The other half of my bracket had Duke beating Tennessee, the team Houston had beaten a couple of rounds back.

Imagine my surprise when Duke managed to squander a 14-point second-half lead to come from ahead to lose to Houston in their semifinal Saturday.

Understand that despite the hype, I had not been sold totally on Duke this year. The guard play was suspect, especially at crunch time. The team had not faced a lot of close contests along the way.

And wunderkind Cooper Flagg seems to have a habit of coming up short in the clutch. I recall times this season watching him stumble and fall while trying to get a late shot. In the Houston loss, he left his mid-range jumper way short when it mattered at the end.

I just had thought Houston, with its ugly, rock-throwing-and-rebounding-the-misses style, would not prevail.

Also, I am not a fan of Houston coach Kelvin Sampson, who commited NCAA violations that got Oklahoma and Indiana in trouble previously in his coaching career. His backers note what were then violations now are legal.

That doesn’t matter to me. College sports have become ridiculous in being a playground of millionaire players now due to Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) payments. But, when Sampson and his staffs did what they did, it was against the rules.

It didn’t help that Sampson came out with some in-your-face comments to Houston doubters after Duke donated that win to the Cougars. He should have been grateful instead of belligerent.

Here’s hoping Florida wipes out Houston Monday. The good news for the Gators, the reason I picked them to win it all, is that they do have a great bunch of guards, led by Walter Clayton Jr., a transfer from tiny Iona.

In a departure from the spirit of these NIL times, Clayton’s total income is not reported, but he did recently announce signing a deal with Turbo Tax, so I am confident he is not hurting for pizza (or tax) money.

Florida also has an abundance of talented big guys.

If the Gators can get it done one more time, I have the solace of at least getting the eventual national champion correct on my bracket. That and about $7 will buy you a designer coffee, if I drank such.

For God’s sake, all of you on the right or the left, can the hysteria. Take a deep breath. Quit hyperventilating.

The weekend is upon us. I seldom drink, but feel free to down my share. Watch the Final Four men’s basketball games to escape your unhappiness.

Go for a walk. Read a book. Take the family out to dinner. Do something, anything, except to obsess over declines in investment or retirement accounts — drops that mean little unless you absolutely, positively, need all the money tomorrow if not sooner.

Hell, early Friday night before writing this I watched a couple of really old movies on Turner Classic Movies just to get away from overhyped types on the business channels I ordinarily like to watch.

That would include know-it-alls such as Jim Cramer, who conveniently forgets about telling us in a previous financial market meltdown – one with legitimate economic roots – that it was safe to hold the Bear Stearns investment firm about five days before it was bailed out for about 1/30^th of its price when Cramer was so sure all was well.

Somehow, despite this and other gaffes, Cramer remains a prominent horse in the CNBC stable.

Many consider the omnipresent Cramer a clown and I’m not going to argue.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you should be as unshocked by the financial markets’ reaction to Donald Trump’s tariff Liberation Day, as by Joe Biden’s debate meltdown that set loose the coup to remove him as the Democrat candidate in the past election.

A month ago, March 4, I wrote on this blog under the headline “Trump Cures Won’t Be Without Pain,” likening what Trump was about to do to cure our trade problem to chemotherapy.

Now, people seem shocked, shocked I tell you, that the financial markets are throwing hissy fits and trantrums because multinational companies won’t be able to continue to generate 30 percent rates of return by paying foreign serfs incredibly low pay to produce products for less than American workers can or will.

China, which loves to bluster, responded to Trump’s tariffs with tariffs of its own. Let’s see who can win that battle over time.

Other nations, and artificial amalgamations of such designed often to present a united economic challenge to the U.S., are reported to be talking about dropping their tariffs on our products to relieve Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

I believe that in a matter of months (maybe many months), this all comes out in the wash. Until then, we could get more of this unsettling price action of recent days, so grow a pair.

Repeat, the rise and fall of portfolio numbers is part of the investment game. It is fluctuation and only matters if you are so moronic as to be overleveraged enough to receive margin calls you cannot satisfy.

If you own your stocks, bonds, commodities outright, you have not “lost” money in recent days, you’ve merely experienced a decline in their price and your net worth.

If you sell at these depressed prices and lock in the loss, then you have lost money; lit it up with a match and tossed it out the car window.

Otherwise, it only matters if you are such a pessimist that you think the nation as we know it is at the end of the line economically due to Trump. Hell, if the Democrats weren’t having a cast of socialists lining up to replace Trump in 2028, one could argue his successor could be counted on to right the ship he is being accused of torpedoing with his tariffs.

The point is, there have been dislocations much worse than this, just since 2000, and always the markets and the economy are stronger down the line, hitting higher highs.

A final word to the MAGA types and Republicans already going squishy on this. I had a considerable drawdown in my financial picture over the past two days and I was buying on the decline. I’m retired and I’m not horrified, terrified, or turning on Trump.

This is what you signed up for by voting for Trump. It’s not just the Washington deep state that sees cleaning up the Swamp as their existential problem. It’s the financial people, too, who see a threat to their cushy lifestyles.

If you didn’t understand that those in the existing culture of ridiculously easy money and inflated asset prices were going to act like so many petulant children when the candy was taken away, you were naive in the extreme.

In view of the fact I’ve been reading reports today that Trump is not about to back down, we should see more of this.

Again, I invoke the chemotherapy analogy. It’s going to be painful. You’re going to feel like throwing up, or maybe you already have tossed your cookies. But, if you can stick it out, the end will make it all worthwhile.

Try to remember that between tantrums.

Donald Trump proclaimed Liberation Day Wednesday, with tariffs one weapon of choice to reinvigorate the U.S. economy – particularly manufacturing.

Union workers in the White House Rose Garden for the ceremony cheered. Democrats and their lapdogs in the LameStream media, even some on supposedly business-oriented cable news channels, were horrified.

Understand, for these people on the business channels, the stock market is the economy and if it hits a rough patch, viewership goes down and they have a hard time spreading sunshine and lollipops to the masses; that the public might be more inclined to buy the stocks of the network’s advertisers.

If things get bad enough, some of these experts might even find themselves joining bureaucrats at the unemployment office, not that anyone need go to such a physical place any longer, sort of like those bureaucrats only had a fleeting relationship with their work stations.

They must have gotten the shakes tonight when Dow futures were indicating a 1,000-point drop tomorrow. My personal favorites, gold and silver, tanked in aftermarket trading and I had a standing order to buy some shares of a silver ETF execute. I have more buy orders at lower prices, but both metals have recovered much of their kneejerk panic drop as I write this at 10 p.m.-ish.

I don’t know if Trump’s bold action is going to work or not. I do know there has been a rush by some countries to reduce tariffs and companies are announcing trillions of dollars in investment in U.S.-based manufacturing plants to avoid tariffs.

I also know that the experts don’t know whether Trump’s plan will work overall. Remember, these naysayers are many of the same people who assured us for four years that Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, completely up to the job of president, and anyone who said otherwise was a ridiculous propagandist.

They also were wrong about small issues such as COVID, Hunter’s laptop and Russia, Russia, Russia.

They are wrong, too, in refusing to admit that our current fiscal path as a debt-burdened nation inhabited by too many debt-burdened residents is unsustainable.

As a young child, I recall being ingrained with the story of the boy who cried wolf, and how proven liars find their credibility lost. Yet, these LameStream media types shed their lies like a duck sheds water and continue to be believed by an uncomfortably large percentage of incredibly dull members of the populace.

In a likely futile attempt to help these intellectual lightweights, allow me to borrow from a popular education method: Explain it like you’re talking to a 5-year-old.

The stock market is not the economy: If someone gives you a few dollars and you spend it all on candy, eagerly devouring it in a short time, you will find yourself hyperactive and about to become sick. That’s the stock market. Pumped up on a sugar high from too much loose money chasing too little candy (stocks) now there is a growing fear of no more money, no more candy, no more fun. A tariff-related price purge might be just what is needed to clear the decks for a better future. But Nvidia remains a great company and isn’t likely to lay off tons of employees, even if its stock dips 20 percent.

Our national debt could be terminal: If mommy and daddy buy you thousands of dollars of toys each week, using their credit cards to pay for it, you are a happy child. But, when mommy and daddy can’t pay the credit card bills, and they can’t pay the mortgage, and they can’t buy food, life becomes very unhappy very quickly. Countries, despite in some cases being able to create money, still need to have strong credit and when that’s gone, so is the country.

Tariffs are a tax on consumers and will stoke inflation: If you have 10 cents, and a piece of candy you typically buy for five cents goes up to eight cents, it really doesn’t affect you until you buy that more-expensive piece of candy. You can find less expensive candy to purchase. You can just not buy any candy at all. Or you can decide to spend the extra money for instant gratification and use more of your available cash. But, you make the decision and it’s not carved in stone you will be spending more money. Also, candy manufacturers, if the high price results in lower sales and revenue, might lower the price closer to the five cents to increase demand.

The United States is being a bully by charging tariffs: Suppose your teacher at school decided to teach a lesson in free enterprise to a class of 20, with the student who makes and sells the most products to the other students getting first prize. All students are given the same amount of play money to purchase the products of others. You sketch five drawings and try to sell them, but the other people decide to add 50 percent extra on your price to slow your sales to them. But, when they try to sell their products to you, or to each other, no add-ons to price are allowed to balance the trades. Would you be surprised if you sold less and they sold more? Shockingly, Trump is the first modern U.S. president willing to address such unfair trade practices. This does not make him wrong.

Back in the early days of me working for Tribune-Review Publishing, owned by billionaire Richard Scaife, he hired freelancer Christopher Ruddy basically to write about the Clintons and their questionable deeds.

These days, Ruddy is worth, on paper, over $3 billion, more than Scaife’s wealth at its highest. No, this is not an April Fools story.

The explanation is, in a word, Newsmax.

Ruddy founded Newsmax as a conservative news site in 1998, in partnership with Scaife. Earlier this week, Newsmax stock started trading publicly on an initial public offering at $10 a share.

As I type this at 3 p.m. Tuesday, Newsmax (ticker symbol NMAX) is trading at about $214 a share and has been as high as $229 earlier today.

The sound you hear is me kicking myself in the butt – repeatedly. Here’s why.

First, I started watching Newsmax and Real America’s Voice cable news channels in the lead up to the 2024 elections because I discovered each offered some great insight, better than usual conservative staple Fox.

They also covered Trump events like blankets and had featured contributors who since have become household names, such as Charlie Kirk.

Ruddy would appear periodically on Newsmax shows touting plans to sell stock in the company. He was looking to share the wealth, so to speak, with the viewership.

I made a mental note, yet never really followed up on it. The whole concept seemed attractive, but I was more into waiting for the explosion in silver prices that had been promised, any day now, since 2011.

The Newsmax initial public offering had slipped my mind until Monday, when it debuted in meteoric fashion, rocketing into the mid-$80s a share.

Behold, the first figurative kicking of my butt. If I’d just bought, say, 100 shares at $10, I’d have made $7,500 or so in one day. For me, that’s notable coin,

But I hadn’t bought, so I chalked it up to opportunity lost.

My wife, not exactly a seasoned investor, told me I should buy more because it would keep going upward.

I patiently explained to her that this is called the greater fool theory in investing – or more correctly, speculation. You buy highly priced stocks or investments anticipating an even bigger fool will pay more due to fear of missing out and the like. It ends badly for those late to the party.

Call this the second figurative kicking of my butt.

Newsmax is up more today, so far, than it was yesterday. Again, I left a lot of potential profit on the table.

Will I buy now?

Of course not.

Will Newsmax race to the moon again when markets open Wednesday? Since I’m not on board, of course it will.

Elon Musk donned a cheesehead hat during a political rally in Wisconsin, trying to get the Republican candidate for state supreme court over the finish line. These days, such seemingly minor races have disproportionate political impact on a national scale.

There were a few protesters, which Musk acknowledged by noting he expected some George Soros surrogates and bade them say hello to George for him. Unlike Musk, who is willing to be in the open about his politics, Soros is a rich guy who lurks in the shadows dispensing money – seemingly often acquired from U.S. taxpayers – and pulling the puppet strings of recipients to further leftist causes.

This Wisconsin rally, and TESLA protesters in Texas quitting en masse at noon, reminiscent of the old days when shifts ended at Johnstown steel mills (not that the grass-roots protesters were being paid), were telling political theater early this week.

Back to Musk, his interplay with the hecklers suggested an update is needed to the lyrics of the George M. Cohan standard “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

Give my regards to Soros.

Remember me to Chairman Mao.

Tell all the gang on the collective farms

That I won’t milk a cow.

Whisper of how I’m yearning

To spend the dough that others make.

Give my regards to old Soros

And tell him just jump in the lake!

Give my regards to Soros.

And all of his ANTIFA friends.

Tell all the people burning the Tesla cars

Their fun is soon to end.

Warn them that Bondi’s coming

And there will be a price to pay.

Give my regards to old Soros

And tell him just to go away!

Talk about peasants with pitchforks taking on tanks, today’s supposed retail silver squeeze day is not going well.

When last I posted here – having been laid low for a few days since Thursday by illness – I predicted in the face of rising silver and gold prices that silver in particular was due to be manipulated lower in coming days.

The calendar provided convenient cover with the end of the month and the end of the quarter, along with President Donald Trump’s April 2 tariff day.

The very next day (Friday) after last I wrote, silver declined 29 cents an ounce. As I write this early Monday afternoon, the next trading day, it’s down another 23 cents at $33.84 an ounce.

Also, as noted in that previous story, gold has been much stronger than silver. Monday was no exception to that trend, with gold hitting record highs of $3,124 an ounce on the spot market while silver languishes about $16 (about 40 percent) or so below its all-time highs, set in 1980 and 2011.

The silver movement, noting this discrepancy, hoped to rally the masses on social media. Alas, it turns out it’s easier to find radicals willing to firebomb Teslas for a few bucks, than it is to find people willing to spend some of their own money on arguably the most underpriced material on Earth.

There had been much anticipation ahead of today, hoping that massive buying of the actual stuff, the silver bullion, would overwhelm the paper market. It is a fool’s errand.

Exchanges allow certain types to sell huge paper positions to force price downward. Again, as noted in the previous post about this, some bankers have been convicted of price manipulation. But that is thought to be a small percentage of those committing these crimes.

Simply put, when you don’t need the metal itself to sell short, you have unlimited capacity. People buying are limited by liquid capital and metal availability.

And that is why I half-kiddingly suggested Elon Musk add taking on silver manipulation to his Quixotic quests. That one should be simple for the world’s richest man. Just begin buying silver publicly and the terrified short crowd (those betting on a price decline) would need to start buying immediately to cover those shorts and avoid bankruptcy.

Silver had been down 40 cents more earlier in the trading today, so maybe silver squeeze people are turning the tide. I plan on waiting for further evidence tomorrow, ironically April Fools Day, along with April 2 to make my call.

I did sell some gold earlier today near the all-time high, expecting that surge to be blunted temporarily. But the gold market is so huge and there are so many institutions, from governments, to international banks, to Chinese insurance companies, looking to buy some for long-term wealth preservation, that will be a tougher nut to suppress than silver.

If and when silver manipulation ends, remember that, according to an online inflation calculator, what cost $50 — silver’s price in 1980 — should cost just under $193 today.

That would make the wait worthwhile in the extreme.

Recent months have provided watershed moments for so-called conspiracy theory nuts to be proved correct over and over again.

We’ve learned that the justice system can and has been weaponized against political opponents (Republicans), that the whole propaganda network of governments and LameStream media spewed misinformation regarding COVID (both origins and measures to combat its spread), that USAID type operations have been funneling tax dollars to absurd, almost exclusively left-wing projects and, that Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie are, indeed, a gay couple.

Dare we dream that the lid is about to be torn off silver manipulation?

An excellent story about the capping of silver prices ran today on zerohedge.com.

Why should you care? Begin with caring because illegal manipulations of markets is not what this country is supposed to be about. And it begs the question of what else they are manipulating.

For context, silver traded as high as $50 an ounce early in 1980 and again challenged that mark in 2011. Note, there is a silver spot price and various contract month prices, so exact figures are a matter of choice.

But, it remains a fact that silver is one of the most useful metals, which ticks the boxes of being a precious metal, money, as well as incredibly useful in various industries such as electronics, solar power and medicine.

Yet, as I write this at midday on Thursday March 27, 2025, more than 45 years after silver first traded near $50 an ounce, silver’s current price is $34.32 on the spot market, up 72 cents on the trading day.

You tell me a similarly useful item trading at less than 70 percent of its price four and one-half decades back.

As another yardstick to measure silver’s suppression, gold now trades above $3,000 an ounce, up from about $800 an ounce in 1980 or $1,900 an ounce in 2011.

Silver price suppression is not just some crazy theory. As the zerohedge story that was referenced above notes, there have been incidences of traders for major banks being convicted of manipulating the silver price. There are even more examples than those mentioned in the story.

As someone who monitors this closely, I can tell you I have been taking profits expecting yet another silver beatdown. The plan is to buy back when the hit comes.

That thinking has not changed, even though price is up today. Friday or Monday would be opportune times to hit the price at the end of a trading quarter. Or April 2, when the Trump tariffs become official, is another possibility.

There are many reasons the government might want to allow the price of silver to be kept down, including reports that there are 500 ounces of silver in each cruise missile. That silver is not being recycled.

Also, rising gold and silver prices serve to remind consumers of continuing inflation.

From the cellphone you no doubt have surgically attached to your hand, to the electronics throughout your house, to solar panels, to high-tech batteries, to antibacterial applications in medicine, to electric cars, silver is useful in many applications.

Yet an estimated 70 to 80 percent of silver is mined as a by-product of acquiring copper, lead or zinc, so silver has no strong lobby. These miners see silver as a bonus to be added onto the profits from their main product.

Here’s where it could get interesting. The Hunt brothers helped fuel that silver rise to $50 in 1980 by buying physical metal and large amounts of futures contracts as a hedge against the high inflation of the time. Inflation back then was running at an annual rate in the low teens according to government figures that many thought understated actual price inflation for the consumer.

At the time, silver was a key to photographic film, so companies such as Kodak were not amused.

Rules were changed to combat the Hunts. The number of contracts per individual was reduced. When that didn’t work, the commodities exchanges, in effect, would not create new futures contracts and only allowed the closing (selling) of existing contracts.

This put considerable pressure on the price and the highly leveraged Hunts barely escaped bankruptcy. Think of the movie “Trading Places.”

To this day, silver remains a relatively small market in terms of overall cash value of available product. Someone such as Elon Musk, with a net worth on the far side of $300 billion as per Forbes magazine, certainly could just start buying and keep accumulating.

Musk’s interest would be acquiring metal critical to his many ventures, including electric cars, rockets and robots. If that would happen, $50 an ounce would be a mere waystation to a high in the hundreds of dollars per ounce.

Although I would hesitate to offer investment advice to Musk, he could quickly get back some of the damage to his net worth from the attack on Tesla stock.

Maybe I’d make a buck or two along with him. A win-win, you might say.

If I make enough, I might even buy a Tesla car. Probably not.

Opening day of the Major League Baseball season is upon us and, surprisingly, the Pirates are the most interesting pro team in Pittsburgh.

This doesn’t mean I’m expecting greatness from the Pirates, or even them making the playoffs. But, compared with the Penguins and Steelers, they have a vibe about them that could keep things interesting for a few months.

With one of the top pitchers in baseball, Paul Skenes, the runaway pick in ESPN’s preseason package to win the National League Cy Young Award this season, the Pirates have a rising star.

Still, the ESPN types don’t think Skenes is enough. Of 28 participants in the survey, none picked the Pirates to win the NL Central and only one thought the Pirates might slip into the playoffs as a wild card.

That owes to an offense that is a lot of question marks beyond Bryan Reynolds and Oneil Cruz and maybe DH Andrew McCutchen. The bullpen also is uncertain.

Skenes and Mitch Keller are great at the top of the starting rotation, reminding of the 1948 Boston Braves with their “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain” rotation. Some blanks beyond them need to be filled if the Pirates are to be playoff contenders.

But the competition for fan interest in the Pittsburgh pro sports scene is, shall we say, limited these days.

The Steelers are looking to continue a trend of shopping for starting quarterbacks in old folks homes. And, embarrassingly, one of those codgers, Aaron Rodgers, is being noncommital. A published report has the Steelers giving Rodgers until April 21 to make up his mind.

Judging by what Rogers has done lately on the playing field, the Steelers just might be better off if he wasn’t interested.

Meanwhile, although the Penguins remain mathematically alive to make the Stanley Cup playoffs, earlier this week the analytic site moneypuck.com reduced the Penguins’ playoff chances to zero, right there with the likes of Chicago and San Jose.

It seems the Penguins, like the Super Steelers of the 1970s, have made the mistake of holding onto star players too long and failing to replace them with younger talent.

This would mark the third consecutive playoff absence for the Penguins, with the record worse in each successive season.

Even though the Steelers started geriatric Russell Wilson at quarterback much of last season, the team did make the playoffs, but only to suffer a characteristic first-game loss, the fifth straight time for that.

When I was a young man, the Steelers just making the playoffs would have been cause for wild celebration. Six Super Bowl wins later, not so much.

It’s the same for the Penguins, whose fans aspire to more than seeing Crosby and Malkin rack up additional personal milestones.

On the other hand, for Pirates fans who last celebrated a World Series title back in 1979, the prospect of having a competitive team, with one of the best pitchers in the game, is generating some excitement for a season that begins today in Miami.

Imagine my surprise when I returned home after an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of day Wednesday to learn that St. Francis College was downgrading its athletic programs to Division III.

This came mere days after the school’s men’s basketball program had played in the NCAA Division I basketball tournament for the first time since 1991.

I was surprised at this move, but I guess I shouldn’t have been.

The compression of Division I sports into a few massive conferences, the embrace of outright free agency via the transfer portal, and the abandonment of amateur status by allowing players to rake in millions of dollars in Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) revenue, all have combined to change big-time college sports into semi-pro sports.

Some will call it progress, or embracing reality. I see it as sad.

I’ve read several articles recently pointing to this year’s NCAA Tournament, devoid of any mid-major or below Cinderalla stories as we reach the Sweet 16 round tomorrow. Instead, we see an abundance of teams from major conferences.

One writer went so far as to pronounce the death of any mid-major programs being able to make it several rounds in future tournaments.

These programs see their star players plucked by bigger programs and the offer of increased exposure and massive NIL money.

Where once these teams kept players for four or five seasons and molded teams, now they serve as farm teams for the big guys, who missed some of these talented players when it came to recruiting them out of high school.

The mid-majors take an unfinished prospect, mold him or her into a producer, and then lose them to the big boys. It’s often the same with the coaches.

St. Francis looked at the reality of the current landscape and pulled the Division I plug.

I’ve covered a lot of NCAA Division III games through the years, along with Division II and plenty of NAIA contests, those last being similar to NCAA Division II and III.

The games can be exciting and entertaining. Sometimes, they have a player or two who could perform on the Division I level.

But it’s not the same as Division I.

Then again, the overly commercial, mercenary, semi-pro product now being proffered as Division I by the NCAA while clinging to its absurd “student-athlete” mantra, isn’t exactly your grandfather’s Division I, either.

St. Francis has stepped down athletically to where it probably should have been for some time. That it felt compelled to do so under the duress of the moment is unfortunate.