Sidney Crosby swears he looked around for a new home for the last year. The kind of place that offers privacy while he's getting jacked up in his hellacious Men's Fitness routine. The type of swingin' bachelor pad where the Crown Royal and Jack Daniels can flow like the mighty Monongahela. A personal space where he can watch Eva Mendes films in stoic solitude.

But then he thought about Mrs. Lemieux's post-defeat chocolate sundaes, the ones with the sprinkles. And how Mr. Lemieux would always let him control the remote in the rec room. And how impossible it would be to separate his Mario posters from Mario's Mario posters, after all this time living together.

Shelley Anderson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that Sidney Crosby will once again be living with Pittsburgh Penguins owner Mario Lemieux's family this season. Quoth The Kid: "I've been looking for a place for the last year, but I haven't found anything I'm quite ready for yet."

Steven Ovadia of Puck Update assesses the living arrangement:

Far be it for me to judge, but isn't he getting a little old to be living with his boss? Another year or two of that and he'll be like Chris Elliott in the wonderful GET A LIFE. Actually, I'd love to see a remake of THE ODD COUPLE with Crosby and Lemieux. I'm assuming one of them is really neat and one of them is really messy.

We'd actually bet on Mario being the messy one. Ex-smokers usually are. Anyway, Anderson's piece -- which also covers the ridiculously cool tradition in which Penguins players hand out season tickets to fans at their homes -- talked about Crosby's offseason training (the ankle is fine), his mental preparedness for the new campaign and, specifically, whether the Detroit Red Wings next season or the Penguins "over the next five to seven years" had a better chance at winning the Stanley Cup:

Crosby grinned. "I love when they ask that question because there's 30 teams and the league isn't [predictable] anymore," said Crosby. "Detroit's got a great team, and they haven't really lost anyone and they've added Hossa. I'm not going to take anything away from them. They're the champions right now and they're a favorite. But since when has it really been a favorite that's really dominated? The league's too competitive. I could say us for the next five years, too, but who knows?"

Emphasis ours, because someone may want to give Sidney a short history lesson about recent Detroit hockey.