Our franchise feature for the week will focus fully — again — on the Penguins’ apparently imminent sale, and it’ll be broken down in bulleted bits that summarize stuff I’ve been told by several sources, every last one of them directly involved in the process:

• Mario Lemieux’s made more than a peripheral connection to presumed buyer David Hoffman and his Chicago-based Hoffman Family of Companies, to the extent that one of the Hoffmans — I never learned which one — was with Mario, Nathalie and the rest of that group in attendance at PPG Paints Arena for this season’s home opener. Nothing formal yet, but there’s a feeling there that … well, let’s just say the Hoffmans need Mario for more than just public good will.

• Why? Because, as I’d begun hearing several weeks ago and have since had supported several times over, the Hoffmans might not be able to bring enough financial backing to satisfy the NHL in preliminary talks, much less approval from the Board of Governors. And it sure wouldn’t hurt, in such a scenario, to have, one, some of Mario’s money toward an enlarged role (he’s currently a limited partner) and, two, Mario’s presence to seal the deal. Since it’s impossible to imagine Gary Bettman, Bill Daly and company ever rejecting No. 66 in any way.

• Why would the Fenway Sports Group sell to the Hoffmans rather than just Mario and longtime partners Ron Burkle and David Morehouse? I’d love to say it’s just because the Hoffmans exceeded FSG’s initial asking price of $1.5 billion by offering $1.75 billion, but the truth’s a lot more layered than that and … I’m not yet at liberty to share since that specific information was told to me off the record. But there’s more.

• The Mario/Burkle/Morehouse offer was $1.1 billion, which, in and of itself, represented a $200 million short-term profit for FSG over the 2022 sale price of $900 million if it’d been accepted. That was, to my knowledge, where everything stalled on that front.

• What would it look like if Mario joins the Hoffmans in an agreement? I don’t know, but I do know that Mario didn’t show up for that opener just to catch some pucks. He was highly visible, he was standing and waving to the crowd with the arena’s big-board camera went to him during a break, he was visible and chatty in multiple settings afterward, including a long talk with Sidney Crosby … and all kinds of other un-Mario-like stuff. For those too young to know what that means, take it from someone who’s covered most of his life/career here in Pittsburgh: He’s as proudly private as it gets.

• The onus here, as I understand it, is on the Hoffmans. They’ve got to demonstrate to the NHL, as any potential new owner would, that they can withstand losses. The league’s been burned several times in the past by owners claiming false or even just exaggerated wealth — remember the infamous case of Duquesne University grad John Spano being convicted of fraud for his bid to buy the Islanders? — and it’s since tightened up the process for approval.

• Mario wants this to happen. He wants to be back to prominence within the Penguins. But it’s got to be, per his personality, in a way that he doesn’t risk swinging and missing on any front.

I’ll stay on it.