Hockey Strike? What Strike?

It's difficult to tell which is worse, the total absence of any progress toward ending the NHL's work stoppage or the lack of outrage about it.

No, that's not true. It's much worse that no one -- at least no one south of International Falls -- cares about when, or even if, the 2004-'05 season will begin.

Part of the apathy can be traced to the NFL season hitting high gear and the prospect of a particularly riveting World Series matchup between St. Louis and the newly Un-Cursed Boston Red Sox. We'll miss hockey a lot more come February, when the televised sports options will be ice fishing and the NBA.

Still, the near-total apathy toward the work stoppage is troubling for the NHL and for league officials' hopes of remaining a distant fourth among the top professional sports.

If Gary Bettman is smart -- okay, forget I said that -- he’d walk into the next negotiation session with a large stack of videos and an even larger stack of newspapers.

He would point to the stack of newspapers and say, "These are all the sports pages that don't have one word about the NHL work stoppage. Not one word." Then, he would point to the videos and say, "These are all the sports shows that haven't mentioned the work stoppage, not one time."

Sure, total extinction isn't likely. There still will be a market for the sport, particularly in Canada.

But survival will come at a price, particularly for the players, who have been living at a standard that would indicate that the sport had built upon the popularity hockey enjoyed in the late 1980s.

Back then -- and doesn't it seem like such a long time ago now? -- Wayne Gretzky was marrying a starlet and guest hosting on Saturday Night Live. Mario Lemieux could have, too, if he had wanted to.

That dynamic duo was scoring 60, 70, 80 goals a year, and a handful of players on a level just below that were slotting more than 50. Hockey had never been that popular before, and it hasn't been as popular since.

For any niche sport, the challenge is to grow and advance into the mainstream, because that's where the money is -- for players and management. In 1990, there were two sports, hockey and stock-car racing, looking to take that step.

The former was a niche sport popular north of the Mason-Dixon Line; the latter a niche sport popular in the south. Since hockey and NASCAR began their battle for the hearts and minds of sports fans, one side did everything right, while the other side did everything wrong.

And this modern-day Civil War had a far different outcome than the original.

Both sports' sanctioning bodies looked to build on their fan bases. But NASCAR did it in a genuine way -- by reaching out to fans and creating a more compelling product.

As some examples of the latter, the sport legislates engine and car-body specifications, in order to minimize differences between cars. On tracks where one driver might be able to dominate his opponents, NASCAR required restrictor plates be installed in the cars' engines, ostensibly to cut speeds for safety reasons.

But the restrictor plates also minimize the distance between first place and last place. And, more importantly, between first place and 10th place. So, even though a lot of drivers hate them, the plates have made more compelling entertainment for fans.

NASCAR also marketed its superstars -- such as the late Dale Earnhardt, Junior Earnhardt, and Jeff Gordon -- very well, which gave fans human faces to root for.

The NHL, meanwhile, tried to build in an artificial manner, by expanding into areas where the sport had no tradition and no built-in fan base beyond those who had once lived up north and moved to escape unemployment or the cold. And those fans generally maintained their loyalties to the teams they left behind.

The expansion also created a talent gap, which forced teams to play the game in a dull fashion that makes a World Cup soccer final look high-scoring. And, while expanding in an attempt to expand that base, the NHL pandered to its base when it should have ignored it.

Instead of creating rules to make the game more wide open and mandating that the officials actually enforce them, the league allowed its product to become even more unwatchable.

With the NHL's top stars scoring fewer than 50 goals, the product also is unmarketable, as well hockey fans know that Ilya Kovalchuk's 41 tallies last season would have been the equivalent of about 70 in 1982, but casual observers who remember Gretzky's 92-goal campaign that year are unimpressed.

Yeah, hockey fans on the Canadian prairie who want more hitting than scoring wouldn't be happy if regular season games looked like All-Star Games, with 7-6 and 8-7 scores every night.

But you know what? They'd keep watching, right along with a lot of new fans who enjoy the excitement.

A lot of NASCAR fans don't like the nouveau fans. And a lot of them hate drivers, like tee-totaling Pepsi-drinking, non-smoker Jeff Gordon, who don't conform to Jim Croce's "Rapid Roy the Stock Car Boy" stereotype, who drinks Coke before the race, beer afterward, and has a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve of his t-shirt.

But they root for the "old school" drivers like Junior Earnhardt and Mark Martin. More importantly, they keep watching.

NASCAR succeeded where the NHL failed. But, thanks to Detroit and the New York Rangers, player salaries have risen to a point that would indicate a much greater level of popularity for the NHL.

The league will survive, but unless things change -- both for management and players -- the next hockey season, whenever that is, might look radically different from the last. There will be fewer teams and the paychecks will be far smaller.

In fact, it might already be too late, guys. We're learning to get along quite nicely without you.