They staged something called the Red Bull Air Race over the Detroit River yesterday, where thousands of Detroiters come out to watch low-flying pilots manoeuvre through a course comprised of 30-foot high, black and yellow pylons.

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Sidney Crosby's Pittsburgh Penguins are down 3-1 in the Stanley Cup final, with the odds stacked against them with Game 5 on tap tonight.

Photograph by : Dave Sandford, Getty Images

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Tonight, thousands of Detroiters will gather once again at the banks of the Detroit River, inside Joe Louis Arena. There they will watch a different game made up of low-flying men and black and yellow pylons. But this time the pylons will have names.

Gill, Gonchar, Scuderi, Whitney.... Yes, it has come to this, hockey fans.

This on-again, off-again, forgettable then unforgettable Stanley Cup final between the Detroit Red Wings and the Pittsburgh Penguins is not only off again, it is verging on the very forgettable, with Detroit clearly the better team and poised to wrap up a tidy, five-game series this evening. Unless of course, this ingenious bit of scheming by Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury can make it into the dossier of his beleaguered head coach Michel Therrien.

"If I can stop more pucks and we score more goals," Fleury divulged yesterday morning, "we'll be all right."

Hmmm. Wish we'd thought of that. Seriously, Fleury is not the problem for Pittsburgh. He has faced far more quantity and quality of chances than his counterpart, Chris Osgood. What is killing the Penguins lies in front of Fleury.

This series -- from start to nearly finished -- has not been about which team played better every night. It has been about how large the gap has been between the teams, with the Wings being the better team by varying margins in all four games thus far --even the one they lost in Game 3.

A team that scored for fun through three rounds has met its match against Detroit's defensive play. The Penguins' power play has not a clue; the break out is panic-stricken.

Evgeni Malkin and Petr Sykora have not registered a point, and have not provided Sidney Crosby's line with even a hint of support scoring. Power-play defenceman Sergei Gonchar has but one piddly assist.

They planned to produce Gonchar at the podium yesterday, perhaps to produce video evidence that he is actually playing in this series. Alas, Gonchar was a mysterious no-show there, too.

"They're an extremely good hockey club, and there is not much room out there," said winger Marian Hossa, who had a fantastic Game 4. "When there is, we've got difficulty to score the goals. We're creating chances, but they're not clean chances like we had before, because they're tracking back really hard.

"We had so much power in our offence, [but] we can't get clean, clean chances like we did in the three previous rounds. It is frustrating, because we know we could score more goals."

Malkin spent a long time alone in his dressing room stall after Saturday's 2-1 loss, head in hands, the reality of another pointless Stanley Cup effort setting in. Not only that, he didn't hit the score sheet.

Though the challenge tonight should be even steeper, with the Red Wings enjoying the last change and expected to have Tomas Holmstrom back in their lineup, Therrien might be listed as questionable for the Penguins.