PITTSBURGH -- There are stark differences between our Christmas traditions and the ones Darius Kasparaitis remembers from Lithuania.

In North America and in Europe, you clean your house on Christmas Eve in preparation for guests. Likewise, Lithuanian families gather together Christmas Day and enjoy lavish meals.

But when he was a boy, Kasparaitis dare not mention the reason for Christmas in public for fear of reprisal from a pernicious state.

"I had a friend who would go to church and he had a lot of trouble in school," Kasparaitis said.

"My grandmother would come back to our house from church with the Eucharist for all of us. That wasn't something we could ever talk about in the street."

Lithuania, a country of 3.7 million people, was a tentacle of the Soviet empire from 1940 to 1990. Traditionally about 85% of its inhabitants were Catholic but for two generations of Lithuanian children, the only acceptable faith was state socialism. Today, some place the percentages of Lithuanians living without a belief in God as high as 40%.

Darius Kasparaitis is not one of them.

"I learned about Jesus from my grandmother," Kasparaitis said. "Only the old people knew. The authorities did not like to see young people going to church."

If Mario Lemieux's return lifts the Pittsburgh Penguins back into the upper strata, we will spend much of our spring staring at a team like no other.

The average NHL team has a North American player among its two top scorers. Aside from the Penguins, the team with the most Europeans on top of the scoring list is the New Jersey Devils with four. Pittsburgh has eight.

Coached by Czech Ivan Hlinka, the Penguins matter because they are, for many, the blueprint of future NHL successes.

The outsiders such as Kasparaitis have brought more than their talents. They have brought their stories.

Tonight, lining up against Kasparaitis, will be Nik Antropov of Kazakhstan. When he was a child, Antropov's mother died of a pneumonia that would have been routinely cured here. His world junior team played with borrowed sticks and in stinking equipment.

Leafs defenceman Dmitry Yushkevich learned in school that the United States manufactured the Cuban missile crisis.

Curse Kasparaitis if you must but remember, it is he who will uphold the standard of the shoulder check once Scott Stevens retires. He is the custodian of the tradition of Bobby Baun and Leo Boivin.

Watch Kasparaitis tonight. In going about his rounds, he is as bloodless as a shark.

Kasparaitis reads a play like a defensive back. He is not playing the puck-handler, he is discerning who will get the next pass. He looks for the puck-handler to motion toward or stare at his target. The rest is not pretty.

This season, his ninth in the NHL, is probably his best. During the off-season, Kasparaitis trimmed the baby fat and dropped 13 pounds to 205 pounds. He is faster but just as solid.

In an era in which bodychecking is being legislated out of existence and players espouse a bogus code about who can and can't be hit, Kasparaitis revels in his role.

Kasparaitis entered the league in 1992 with the New York Islanders, tossing Lemieux and the Penguins out of the playoffs. In 1998, Kasparaitis inflicted one of the earliest and most devastating of Eric Lindros' concussions. He wears his hair long and stringy, the better for the fans to remember, and he remains as he was in the beginning: blithely ignorant of the protocol of protection for star players.

And yet, tonight at 7, Darius Kasparaitis will commune with God and ask for peace. "Before the game, I pray I won't get hurt and no one will get hurt."

And then he will do his best to see his prayers go unanswered.