PITTSBURGH — I have always found it delightfully ironic that Tom Brady, who ruined so many promising winters in Pittsburgh, also made them better. As Sidney Crosby’s concussion was becoming career-threatening in 2011, it was Brady who reached out to Crosby and offered medical advice and contacts to help in the recovery process.

But other than being two of the greatest athletes of all time, Crosby and Brady don’t seem to have all that much in common. Or do they?

Crosby turns 38 today, which is hard to believe. He has been a member of the Penguins organization for more than half of his life (20 years and counting). When a great hockey player hits this age, you know the end is near — like Bob Dylan once said, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there.”

But is it? Realistically, sure. But this is Crosby we’re talking about. Jim Rutherford, his former general manager, once told me, “He’s not going to age like other players. Do you know why? Because he isn’t like other players.”

Rutherford said that in 2019 and he was right.

Let’s take a look at the numbers for a moment. This is Crosby’s points-per-game average in each season during his 30s:

Age 30, 2017-18 season: 1.09
Age 31, 2018-19 season: 1.27
Age 32, 2019-20 season: 1.15
Age 33, 2020-21 season: 1.13
Age 34, 2021-22 season: 1.22
Age 35, 2022-23 season: 1.13
Age 36, 2023-24 season: 1.15
Age 37, 2024-25 season: 1.14

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any regression in those totals.

If you have a truly astute hockey eye and study Crosby thoroughly, perhaps you see the slight changes in his game. He doesn’t explode through with neutral zone with quite the suddenness of his youth, for instance. But to be honest, that’s about the only thing in his game that looks any different than it did a decade ago, and even that might not be accurate. It could simply be that the rest of the league has gotten faster in the past decade and his body is doing exactly what it always has done.

All of which brings us back to athletes’ careers enduring much longer than they once did in general, and Brady specifically.

Peak Brady in 2007 might have had more arm strength than the 43-year-old Brady who won the Super Bowl to conclude the 2020 season for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. As I recall, 43-year-old Brady would have the occasional off game, something that never happened to 30-year-old Brady. Yet he was still among the best, even at that age, and still able to engineer another championship even after so many had written him off.

Is it inconceivable to imagine Crosby doing something similar?

Oh, it won’t happen this season. Or the one after, I imagine. Crosby is playing for a rebuilding team, something Brady never had to do. Crosby, however, isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Surrounded by one of the NHL’s worst rosters last season, he still put up nearly 100 points. While Rickard Rakell and Bryan Rust are very much above-average NHL players, let’s not act like either of his linemates is a superstar. Crosby wasn’t getting cheap points because of them. He was putting up all of those points because he was Crosby.

Crosby’s drive to succeed has inspired more than one generation of hockey players. (Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)

Kyle Dubas has done a good job of acquiring assets for his rebuilding Penguins during the past 18 months. Finally, they have a thriving minor-league system, one that is going to produce one NHL player after another in coming seasons.

There is one problem, though: Where is the star power going to come from? That’s always the biggest problem for rebuilding teams that aren’t lucky enough to win the draft lottery.  If the ping pong ball bounces the right way next spring and the Penguins snatch Gavin McKenna, then the rebuild will have gone from 0 to 100 MPH in a heartbeat and everything changes. But the odds are — sorry — that this won’t happen.

The truth is, Stanley Cup teams need superstars. You don’t win a Cup without the likes of Aleksander Barkov, or Jack Eichel, or Nikita Kucherov. Hockey might be the ultimate team game, but you better have star power or you won’t last long in the playoffs.

The Penguins have one superstar capable — even at the grand old age of 38 — of carrying a team through the grind that is the Stanley Cup playoffs, if surrounded by teammates who are capable of keeping up with him.

The common assumption these days is that by the time the Penguins build a truly good team, Crosby will have walked off into the sunset. (Or, if you live anywhere else but Pittsburgh, you think he’ll be wearing an Avalanche or Canadiens jersey by then). We are basing this on history and on math. History and math are two fine teachers, so I’m not disputing the potential that Crosby is near the end and we’ll see a sharp decline in his play sooner rather than later. We saw it in Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky at this age. We’ve seen it in others.

Perhaps all of this, however, is selling Crosby short. He will never catch Gretzky’s numbers (no one will) and he’ll never showcase Lemieux’s talent (no one will), but he also has other attributes that exceed those two. They didn’t have Crosby’s drive. (No one does.) I don’t think they had his obsession with winning, either, and that is what keeps him chugging along.

I asked Crosby last season if he was going to take a break following the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game. He was exhausted and wasn’t 100 percent, the Penguins’ season was going nowhere: it seemed reasonable.

He just shook his head and responded quietly, “Nah. When you get older, you start to feel it in your hands if you take time off. I can’t do that.”

As he ages, he works even harder to maintain this level. He does it because he takes tremendous pride in being the Penguins’ captain, yes. He does it because he wants to win one more gold medal as captain of Team Canada in February.

But he does it for another reason, too. He’s hopeful Dubas pushes the right buttons, this rebuild happens faster than anticipated and a new era of Penguins arrives in the playoff picture again faster than anyone expects.

If that happens, Crosby will be waiting to dominate in the springtime, like he’s done so many times before. And maybe, just maybe, he’ll still be Crosby.

Perhaps it’s nothing more than a birthday wish. But Crosby might also be capable of willing such a thing to happen. The clock is surely ticking, but it ticks a little more slowly for him, and maybe it won’t be dark for a while.

He isn’t like the others, after all.

(Photo of Sidney Crosby and Tom Brady: Justin Berl and Mike Ehrmann / Getty Images)