There are five ways to score a goal in hockey.
You can score at even strength. You can score on the power play. You can score shorthanded. You can score on a penalty shot. And you can score into an empty net.
On December 31, 1988, at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, one man did all five in a single game. Mario Lemiuex. "Super" Mario.
It has never happened again. It had never happened before. In more than a century of professional hockey, across hundreds of thousands of games, exactly one player has completed the full set in one night.
Why It Is Nearly Impossible
Most hockey records are hard because they require sustained excellence. This one is hard because it requires a very specific and extremely unlikely sequence of game situations to all occur in the same sixty minutes, and then requires one player to convert every single one.
Consider what has to happen:
**Even strength and power play** are the easy ones. Any productive scorer gets chances in both situations most nights.
**Shorthanded** requires your team to take a penalty, requires you to be on the penalty kill (which most elite offensive players are not), and requires you to create and finish a scoring chance while playing a man down. Fewer than 300 shorthanded goals are scored across the entire NHL in a typical season.
**A penalty shot** is the killer. There are usually somewhere between 20 and 40 penalty shots awarded in an entire NHL season across all 32 teams. A specific player being awarded one on a specific night is a coin flip inside a lottery. And then you have to score it, and penalty shot conversion sits around 30 to 35 percent.
**An empty net goal** requires the game to be close enough late that the opposing team pulls their goaltender, but not so close that you lose, and requires you to be the one on the ice who gets the puck.
Stack those together. The penalty shot alone makes this a once-in-a-generation event. Combine it with a shorthanded goal in the same game, from the same player, and you are into territory that may simply never repeat.
New Year's Eve, 1988
The game was against the New Jersey Devils. Pittsburgh won 8-6.
The five goals came in order across all three periods. Even strength. Power play. Shorthanded. Penalty shot. And then, with the Devils pressing late and their goaltender on the bench, the empty netter to close it out.
The building understood what was happening before the final goal went in. By the time the penalty shot was awarded, the arithmetic was obvious to everyone watching: four down, one to go, and the only thing left was an empty net.
Then New Jersey pulled their goalie.
The 1988-89 Season
The five-way game did not happen in isolation. It came in the middle of one of the most statistically absurd individual seasons in NHL history.
That year the same player finished with 85 goals and 114 assists for 199 points in 76 games. He won the Art Ross Trophy as the league's leading scorer. He averaged better than two and a half points per game.
And he finished second in the MVP voting, because Wayne Gretzky, in his first season in Los Angeles, had 168 points and the writers gave it to him. That is the level of competition at the top of the sport in 1989: 199 points was not automatically good enough.
The New Year's Eve game was simply the night that everything the man could do happened to fit into one box score.
The Records That Sit Around It
The 1988-89 season produced a cluster of marks that give the five-way game context:
**199 points** remains the fourth-highest single-season total in NHL history. The three above it all belong to Gretzky.
**85 goals** is the third-highest single-season goal total ever, behind only Gretzky's 92 and Brett Hull's 86.
**13 shorthanded goals** that season is an NHL record that still stands. That detail matters here: the shorthanded goal in the five-way game was not a fluke. This was a player who scored shorthanded more often than anyone in the history of the league, which is a large part of why he was in a position to complete the set at all.
**Eight points in a single game** (five goals, three assists) tied him for one of the highest single-game totals ever recorded.
Why It Still Matters
Hockey has changed enormously since 1988. Goaltenders are bigger, better trained, and play a fundamentally different style. Defensive systems are more sophisticated. Video review has tightened officiating. Scoring is down from the wide-open 1980s and has never fully returned.
Which means the conditions that produced this record are less likely now than they were then. Fewer penalty shots. Tighter games. Less ice time for any one player. The 80s were a scoring environment that simply does not exist anymore.
There are records that feel breakable and records that feel permanent. Gretzky's 215 points feels permanent. Teemu Selänne's 76 rookie goals feels permanent.
Five goals, five ways, in one game feels like something else entirely: not just hard to break, but hard to even set up. You cannot train for it. You cannot plan it. The game has to hand you all five doors on the same night, and you have to walk through every one.
It happened once, on New Year's Eve, in Pittsburgh, in 1988.
Even strength. Power play. Shorthanded. Penalty shot. Empty net.
Five ways. One night. Never again.
Odd Man Rush makes original hockey history apparel.