He's been there almost from the beginning, in one capacity or another. A soulful survivor from the earliest modern expansion daze.

Somehow, Dean Lombardi has managed to keep his perspective.

"I had a chance to go to New Jersey and be Louie's assistant GM once," the current San Jose Sharks general manager said, referring to Devils GM Lou Lamoriello. "I'm still kicking myself for not doing it. If you had told me then that I'd have to go through what I did in our first four years here to get where I am now, I'd have said no way. I would have gone to New Jersey instead. I'd have two rings by now."

	Owen Nolan's emergence as a star helped turn things around.

His humor borders on self-deprecating. His honest appraisals border on the blunt. But the progress the Sharks have made under Lombardi's reign as general manager is obvious. Maybe that's why he doesn't bother to mince words.

"I've been here since the beginning, but I've only been the general manager for four years now," said Lombardi, the team's assistant GM when the Sharks started play in 1991. "One thing about the history of this franchise that often gets overlooked is that it fired its general manager after the first year. After that, it got to a point of where it was a management triumvirate, I guess you could say. The president was a basketball guy, and we had a marketing guy and we had me and we had coaching changes. And it set the franchise back. We had no business plan.

"But a lot of that was covered up because we were still considered a Cinderella team."

That happened when the Sharks, who had acquired a pair of 35-year-old Russian legends in Sergei Makharov and Igor Larionov, had their surprise playoff run in their third season, upsetting top-seeded Detroit in the first round. But what they didn't have was a stable management situation.

Lombardi, a lawyer and former player agent, was stunned when co-owner George Gund fired original Sharks GM Jack Ferreira after the first season. Just 34 at the time, Lombardi was elevated to a co-management role. Not that it helped clarify his career.

"Sometimes I didn't know what I was," he said. "I had so many damn titles, I don't know if anybody knew what direction we were going in."

Nonetheless, Lombardi found himself still there when Larionov and Makharov were sent away in a rebuilding effort that was accompanied by a disastrous start to the 1995-96 season. The Sharks won just one of their first 19 games in that fall of '95. It was after that season that Lombardi thought his sacrificial stay in San Jose had reached a fitting finale.

"George (Gund) had his advisors in Cleveland, and you never really knew exactly what was going on with them," said Lombardi. "So he says he wants to meet with me in his office and I thought, 'OK, this is it.'"

Instead of being canned, Lombardi said he was jarred by what Gund told him: "He said, 'I'm giving you the reins. You've seen a lot. See what you can do.'"

	“	I had to start from nothing. I had to rebuild the scouting staff and the coaching staff. And that's just the short version of what went on. ”
		— Sharks GM Dean Lombardi

Lombardi took a look around and saw a lot of empty chairs from where other front-office people and coaches had been ousted in Gund's 1996 purge. Truly a survivor, Lombardi also surveyed what was left as far his hockey operations were concerned.

"I had to start from nothing," Lombardi said. "I had to rebuild the scouting staff and the coaching staff. And that's just the short version of what went on."

Now in control, Lombardi was aggressive in the draft, obtaining four first-round picks in two years -- among them the heralded Patrick Marleau. He built a young base while patching holes elsewhere with Group III unrestricted free agents like Bob Rouse, Mike Craig, Gary Suter, Vincent Damphousse, and also trading for Stephane Matteau, Mike Ricci, Murray Craven and goalie Mike Vernon.

"I had to give 17,000 people a product; a reason to keep going to that big building of ours," Lombardi said. "At that time, all the stories about us were how dysfunctional we were as a management group. Everybody was getting killed in the media, including me, and rightfully so. But these fans here, while they were angry, they also never abandoned us."

By the second season under Lombardi, the Sharks were back in the playoffs. Owen Nolan became a star, while young talents like Jeff Friesen and Mike Rathje developed. They made the playoffs again in 1999, and last season were a surprise preseason Cup pick by several so-called hockey experts.

But again, Lombardi had a more honest assessment of what he'd built.

"We weren't there yet," he said. "Since we had acquired all those Group III kind of players a couple of years before, we had a bunch of players over the age of 30."

So went another year of wheeling and dealing, and by the time the Sharks reached the playoffs last season, 10 players on their roster were 24 years old or younger. Still, in the vein of that Sharks team from six years earlier, they knocked off top-seeded St. Louis.

"Yeah," Lombardi added. "And then Dallas came along and said to us, 'OK, nice try, now see you later.'

"We're just not there yet."

Nine years, numerous job titles and three rebuilding campaigns later, Lombardi sees his Sharks as a good young team lacking a vital veteran presence. Another leader on the ice would be nice, but San Jose still isn't in the financial ballpark of several other real Cup contenders. Of course, compared to the way things used to be, Lombardi will carry on the way he always has in San Jose.

"Well, I don't think anybody here is going to get so caught up with us that they're going to start ordering Stanley Cup rings just yet. But at least there's a reason for optimism now."

Rob Parent covers the NHL for the Delaware County (Pa.) Times. His NHL East column appears every week on ESPN.com.