The Four-Month Itch

Okay, I admit it. I really, really, ridiculously miss the NHL.

I held out for a pretty good amount. This is coming from a guy who owns season tickets, orders NHL Center Ice on satellite, buys the annual video game release, and listened to the NHL's daily radio show online during the season and the playoffs. This is coming from a guy who hits reload on his web browser every two minutes during the trade deadline to make sure that he doesn't miss a big deal.

This is coming from a guy who has been mentally and emotionally prepared for this for years. Everyone new the 2004 Stanley Cup would mark the beginning of a lengthy lockout. Problem is, I remained optimistic that the powers-that-be would come to their senses. After all, billionaires squabbling with millionaires over billions in revenue was sheer stupidity. Too many smart people were involved in this to not realize the potential long-term damage this could have on the sport. Too many smart people were involved to realize that the NHL was already suffering on so many fronts, that a blow like this wasn't shooting itself in the foot — it was shooting itself in the head.

And yet, I also understood the position of the league. Gary Bettman knows that his owners are too competitive — and too stupid — to contain themselves. He also knows that player agents are too crafty to assume that a few simple roadblocks would keep salaries from escalating. He sees a salary cap as a means for leveling the playing field for everyone. Love it or hate it, you can at least be sure that Bettman believes in his stance 100%, even if all of the owners don't.

And you know what? I was okay with that. If the lockout meant that the trade deadline was no longer be the annual Colorado/Detroit pump-up spectacle, if it meant that free agent season no longer produced forehead-slapping contracts from the New York Rangers, if it meant that the Pittsburgh Penguins could have the same budget as the Dallas Stars, then darn it, I'm okay with that. I could handle the pain to make sure that my beloved NHL never turned into the financially imbalanced disaster that was Major League Baseball.

Or at least, I thought I could. I was very strong at the beginning. I read my daily lockout news, but knew things wouldn't actually heat up until late December. Until then, I shut hockey out of my mind. I still played my weekly house league games, and I even fired up this year's new video game to get my fix, but by and large, the NHL and hockey were far from my mind.

And then it began. Innocently enough, I caught a classic game on my local FOX Sports Net. It was a playoff game from several years ago, and my overachieving hometown crew had pulled off a major upset to close out the series. At the end of the broadcast, they announced the date of the next classic game. Thinking nothing of it, I programmed it into my TiVo and went on about my business.

The next classic game was a thriller from the 2003-2004 season. My hometown boys, after a hideous 2002-2003 season, had rebuilt and reformed into a speedy, creative, tough, and fun team to watch. Seven months removed from the Stanley Cup playoffs had purged the memories of how good my team could be — and how much fun NHL hockey could be, even with its current obstruction problems. My hockey itch was coming back.

My hometown team gave season ticket holders free tickets to a game featuring their AHL affiliate. It was a gesture of goodwill to fans that had been starving. My friends were reluctant to go, but I convinced them that if nothing else, we could resume our pre-game and intermission rituals of meeting up and critiquing everything on the ice.

The game itself was pretty awful. The hockey was sloppy, and our AHL squad didn't even score a goal, despite playing in front of a reasonably filled arena and skating out to an NHL quality introduction and production values. Still, sitting among my fellow fans, hearing the ooos and aahs that came with a great scoring chance, screaming at the lackluster power play, and groaning at yet another lost face off, things felt right. I was at home. And yet, I wasn't. I was, as my friend put it, watching fake hockey.

A few days after, I popped in my DVD of the Tampa Bay Lightning championship. I watched the feature program, which captured the Lightning's playoff march in more cinematic detail than an ESPN broadcast ever could. I topped it off by watching Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, a bonus feature of the DVD. I marveled at Jarome Iginla's speed and power, Vincent Lecavalier's shifty moves to set up Ruslan Fedotenko's second goal, Nikolai Khabibulin's inhuman cross-crease save in the third period, and the sheer joy on Dave Andreychuk's face as he lifted Lord Stanley.

Next came this past week's World Junior Championships. The Christmas night thriller between Russia and the U.S. reminded me of the same defensive miscues of my AHL viewing; however, it featured immense skill, speed, and passion. I'm convinced that you could show that game to any casual sports fan and they would take a liking to The Coolest Game. I watched the U.S. beat the Swiss while squandering away the Belarus game. I watched the U.S. pull together for a dominating victory against the Swedes. I watched Ray Bourque fall asleep on camera. And I watched Alexander Ovechkin dominate, cementing his status as one of the NHL's brightest future stars.

Hockey was back in my life and I was hurting. I pulled out my copy of "On The Road" by Howard Berger. Berger chronicled the 1995 Maple Leafs by traveling to nearly every game with the team. Berger's book begins with him awaiting the end of the 1995 lockout, a topic that I hadn't visited in detail in years. It was a different era back then. A decade ago, the owners wanted a luxury tax and the players said, "Never!" A decade ago, the Internet was there to give us daily sound bites and news stories when nothing happened in particular. A decade ago, the owners thought they won by getting the most restrictive free agency in sports. After all, all they had to do was stick to their budgets and they had the players by the throat. Right?

A decade ago, the rhetoric was almost exactly the same. The same vitriol, the same sarcastic words, the same dirty looks, it was all there. We forget because it wasn't documented by our 24/7 media culture that the Internet has given us.

The problem is that this time, the stakes are much higher. In 1995, Sports Illustrated dubbed the NHL as the hot new sport. Ratings were trending up, excitement was high, and the league just signed a new TV deal with FOX and ESPN. As we begin 2005, the NHL barely graces SI and other US magazines, ratings are bottoming out, and the league's new deal with NBC doesn't even involve any money for the league.

Ten years ago, months and months of harsh words and company-line rhetoric came down to a two-day marathon bargaining session between Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow. Will history repeat itself? I sure hope so, because I'm hurting. And I know I'm not the only one.

And if a deal isn't reached, the only thing that will be hurt more than the hearts of fans like me will be the state of the game in the professional sports world.