WILMINGTON, Mass. — The smile spread across Matt Bartkowski’s face even before the question was finished.

How will it feel to play against his hometown Penguins, the team he rooted for as a youngster?

“I can’t believe how many times I’ve been asked that,” the Bruins rookie defenseman said with a laugh. “It’s going to be awesome.”

Especially if Boston upsets Pittsburgh, the club that won two Stanley Cups in the 1990s with two players who became his idols, Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr.

Now Lemieux is a co-owner of the Penguins and Jagr is Bartkowski’s teammate in Boston. The teams begin the Eastern Conference finals in Pittsburgh on Saturday night.

“It’s kind of cool we get to play playoffs in my hometown,” Bartkowski said. “At the end of the day, I’m on Boston and that’s Pittsburgh. We’re there to win.”

A former standout at Mt. Lebanon High — a proud school with its own rink tucked away neatly in a suburb south of Pittsburgh — Bartkowski made his playoff debut in Game 5 of the opening round against Toronto after being recalled from Providence of the AHL to replace the injured Wade Redden.

He next appeared in Game 7 vs. the Maple Leafs, scoring the first goal before the road team posted the next four. But he and the Bruins rallied, won 5-4 in overtime, and suddenly, he appeared as if he was there to stay.

He played well with this time in all five games of the next round against the New York Rangers. But Andrew Ference, sidelined the last seven games with a lower body injury, could return soon and that could leave Bartkowski out of the lineup.

All that said, he’s already accomplished more than he could have imagined when he was lightly recruited out of high school.

“I knew he could be a pretty good player probably by his junior year,” said Paul Taibi, his high school coach. “The NHL was kind of a dream still at that point.”