PITTSBURGH — The Penguins’ nostalgia tour is escalating to unprecedented places.

Marc-Andre Fleury, the legendary goaltender who spent the final eight seasons of his career playing for various NHL teams, is finishing where it all started. Kind of.

Pittsburgh general manager and president of hockey operations Kyle Dubas announced Friday that Fleury is joining the team that he spent the first 13 seasons of his career with on a professional tryout agreement.

Fleury, 40, will join the Penguins for practice at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, September 26, before suiting up to play in parts of the their exhibition game against the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday, September 27 at 7:00 p.m. at PPG Paints Arena.

Fleury announced his retirement from hockey earlier this year and finished his career in a playoff series loss for the Minnesota Wild against the Vegas Golden Knights, another of his former teams. However, Fleury decided to play a little longer and agreed to play for Team Canada in the IIHF World Championships in Sweden in May. Part of his reasoning was that he wanted to play with Sidney Crosby one last time.

Now, he’s getting another opportunity.

Though Fleury has received a PTO from the Penguins, there is no intention that he will play in the regular season for the team that selected him first overall in the 2003 NHL Draft. Rather, Fleury is set to join the Penguins in training camp and is going to take part in an exhibition game so that his final hockey appearance is wearing black and gold, and so that his children will have the opportunity to see their father play for the Penguins before he officially retires.

He has three children: Estelle, 12, Scarlett, 9, and James, 6.

This falls somewhere between a one-day contract and an actual PTO.

On the surface, this might seem a bit peculiar, given that the Penguins are dealing with a goaltending competition and that preseason games and training camp are going to serve as the battleground for as many as four other players who will be in competition. The Penguins, however, are fierce in their desire to celebrate the past. Dubas got to know Fleury during the world championships and commented during that time that he believed it was extremely important for the Penguins to do a better job of honoring their past great players.

“The entire Penguins organization is honored to welcome Marc-Andre Fleury back to the ice in Pittsburgh,” Dubas said in a press release. “This past year everyone witnessed how beloved and respected Marc is in the game of hockey, but the adoration goes beyond his accolades and career. Marc means so much to our team, our fans and the City of Pittsburgh because of the person he is and the example he set. The Penguins feel he and his family are most-deserving of this opportunity to celebrate this full-circle moment back where it all started in front of the black and gold faithful.”

Fleury went 375-216-68 in his 12 seasons with the Penguins, helping them win the Stanley Cup three times during that span. He is the franchise’s all-time leader in essentially every goaltending category.

His divorce from the Penguins was a fairly civil one in 2017, as he ultimately requested that they trade him to the then-expansion Vegas team that badly wanted him to be their centerpiece. Former general manager Jim Rutherford asked Fleury if he wanted to be traded to a different team during the 2016-17 season because of the emergence of Matt Murray. With the expansion draft months away, there was no way the Penguins could keep both. At the time, Fleury told Rutherford he was going to stay in Pittsburgh for the remainder of the season to win another Stanley Cup.

That’s exactly what happened.

Fleury returned to Pittsburgh for a handful of games following the trade, but didn’t always play well there and acknowledged that he didn’t like facing the Penguins. Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and Bryan Rust remain on the roster from his Pittsburgh days.

“I don’t like it, playing against them,” he said in 2023. “Those are my friends.”

Nearly a decade later, he’s coming back again, one final time.

(Photo: Gregory Shamus / NHLI via Getty Images)