PHOTO BY HARRISON BARDEN/PITTSBURGH PIRATES

If nothing else this week, we’ve been reminded you can sometimes find a few silver linings even when things seem particularly bleak.

They’re there, if you look hard enough.

And for that we must first and foremost thank Paul Skenes.

Skenes took the mound on Wednesday afternoon in Tampa for a Pirates team that had mostly resembled amateurs through the first six games of the new campaign. The Bucs were alarmingly bad, even by their standards. A team from which not much if anything was initially expected had somehow seemed to find a way to lower the lowest of bars.

But then Skenes took the mound and did what he does. In his second start of the season, he dominated the Tampa Bay Rays — and the Pirates actually won a game.

He was in much more control than in the season opener at Miami in a game the Pirates could have won but didn’t. But Skenes was in command in Tampa.

His seven-inning clinic confirmed another preseason suspicion, the one that stated the Pirates could and would at least look like a Major League team every five days (or six if the Bucs remain committed to five days off between dominance) whenever Skenes gets the ball.

Remembering as much might keep the torches and pitchforks away from the vicinity of PNC Park, at least until mid-summer.

We also learned this week that Robert Morris men’s basketball coach Andy Toole wouldn’t be going anywhere after giving Alabama all it could handle in the first round of the Big Dance.

RMU’s starting five all entered the transfer portal in search of bigger and better in the immediate aftermath.

But Toole agreed to a multi-year contract extension, in part because he presumably received a significant bump in compensation but also because the New Jersey native understands the grass isn’t necessarily greener elsewhere than it is in Western Pennsylvania.

Toole spoke prior to the Colonials’ postseason run about how he’d gleaned an appreciation during his first 15 seasons on the job, as had his family, for his time in Western Pennsylvania — for living in Mt. Lebanon, for going to Pirates games, for the resources available to him at RMU and for the faith the school showed in him by hiring him at age 29.

Toole also emphasized it had never been his goal to be one of those nomadic, mercenary coaches obsessed with moving from place to place in a never-ending search for fame and fortune. There’s been multiple examples, as the NCAA Tournament has played out, of coaches reportedly negotiating for new jobs while still trying to coach their current team in the tourney.

Toole’s commitment to building again what RMU put on display this season is refreshing by comparison.

And last but not least, the Aaron Rodgers saga may continue to lack a resolution (annoyingly so by this late juncture) but at least Greenfield has surprisingly found a place in the sun while the Rodgers drama continues to unfold.

Steelers president Art Rooney II talked at the NFL Annual Meeting in Palm Beach, Florida., about Rodgers’ recent visit with the team on the South Side and what had been discussed.

“We talked about Greenfield, and about how much he knows about Greenfield,” Rooney reported.

That, no doubt, has a lot to do with Rodgers’ former head coach in Green Bay, Mike McCarthy, being from the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Greenfield.

As for Rodgers, he may or may not agree to QB the Steelers sometime before the 2025 postseason commences.

But if it never comes to pass, at least we’ll know Magee Field, St. Rosalia’s and Big Jim’s joined forces to make the best possible sales pitch.

As the neighborhood sign says: “A Fine Residential Community.”

It never hurts to remember, especially when times are tough, how good we still have it.

Mike Prisuta is the sports anchor/reporter for Randy Baumann and the DVE Morning Show. He’s also the host of the Steelers Radio Network Pregame Show and the color analyst for Robert Morris University men’s hockey broadcasts.