PHOTO: PITTSBURGH PENGUINS

Now that Kyle Dubas has been hired and Erik Karlsson has arrived and training camp has officially commenced, optimism abounds again for the Penguins.

But before they spend too much time contemplating where they may be headed, they’d better remember where they’ve been.

That would be on the outside looking in.

The Penguins missed the playoffs last spring for the first time in 17 seasons.

And they had no one to blame but themselves.

Yes, Ron Hextall was in over his head and horrifically bad as a general manager.

Yes, the bottom six forwards were deficient (they’re always perceived as such in any season that doesn’t end with the hoisting of a Stanley Cup).

And yes, goaltender Tristan Jarry was injured, inconsistent and too often unreliable as a result.

Those are all legitimate reasons why the Pens weren’t perceived as a team capable of contending for another Cup last season and ultimately didn’t.

But not even making the playoffs betrayed what’s really rotten in Cranberry.

All the Pens had to do to at least qualify for the NHL’s postseason tournament was beat Chicago and Columbus, the two worst teams in the NHL at the time, in the regular season’s final two games.

Instead, they lost to the Blackhawks, 5-2, on April 11 at home.

The next night the Islanders beat the Canadiens, and suddenly it was over.

The Penguins had gotten what they’d earned, and what they deserved.

The Chicago debacle was a microcosm of what the Penguins had become.

They generated chances but too often didn’t finish.

They gave up goals in rapid-fire succession.

When the momentum of the game changed, they couldn’t find a way to regain it.

And when all else failed, the stars were unable to shine.

Those weren’t isolated occurrences.

Throw in a blown third-period lead and the disaster against the Blackhawks would have checked all the boxes.

Alas, the Pens never had a lead of any kind against a lineup replete with AHL-caliber players playing for a team that had every reason to be more interested in best positioning itself to draft Connor Bedard than beating the Penguins.

“If you look at the first 40 (minutes), we missed so many chances,” Kris Letang lamented in the immediate aftermath. “We had an opportunity to get up in the scoring, we didn’t.

“And I think in the third (period) we kind of got frustrated and kind of imploded, giving up chances and stuff. It’s a tough one to swallow.”

That’s who they were as recently as last April, a team that gets frustrated and implodes and misses the playoffs.

If they erected tombstones on such occasions, “frustrated and imploded” would have been a fitting epitaph.

That’s the starting point for the 58 players who reported to the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex on Thursday.

That’s what needs to be addressed, first and foremost, as Mike Sullivan likes to say “moving forward.”

And you don’t fix that simply by gassing the general manager, trading for Erik Karlsson and reconfiguring the bottom six.