On Wednesday, NHL owners announced what one increasingly obscure corner of the American sporting landscape knew was coming for months: NHL players have been locked out of work for the start of the 2004-2005 season.
But with disgruntled Texas Rangers throwing chairs at chiding spectators, NFL quarterbacks throwing touchdown passes over rusty first-week defenses, and hurricanes throwing college football kickoffs completely off schedule, has anyone really noticed?
I hardly did. My roommate keeps sobbing himself to sleep each night while wearing his Columbus Blue Jackets jersey as a nightshirt. He also continues to sweat profusely.
But the rank B.O. wafting into the hall every time I return from class is the only thing that reminds me that 5,000 Canadians, 500 Europeans, and five Americans are now unemployed.
I don't mean to be snide. I actually consider myself one of the more hockey-friendly American sports fans I know. But it's one thing to be friendly to a sport, and entirely another to be friendly to a league.
So as long as evacuating is in, I say to the sport of hockey, "Run, er, skate! Skate as fast as you can! Skate away before the tidal surge, er, crumbling ice of half-empty arenas and half-balanced team budgets gives way and you're really in the sin bin."
The NHL has been in trouble for a while now. You didn't have to know the specifics - heck, I sure didn't. All I knew is that I once went to the MCI Center on a Sunday evening, scalped an on-ice ticket for just 40 bucks, and listened to neighboring fans complain - quietly of course - that the crowd was too quiet.
I do know that as the NHL boomed in the early '90s, it expanded much too fast, and if truth be told, too far south of where any Zamboni should glaze.
For some reason, hockey's talking heads thought kids in Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona and California would drop their football, basketball and baseball, to search for ice surfaces that survive 100-degree temperatures and 70-degree dewpoints.
The NHL thought those kids' fathers and mothers would push them away from century-old sporting traditions and into what is, in rural America, a more expensive, inconvenient and foreign pastime.
And for some reason, they thought owners should rob small but loyal hockey-loving Canadian communities - you know, the ones where ice happens outdoors in Winnipeg and in Quebec City, making those Canadian kids grow up dreaming of being a Thrasher, a Predator or, God help us, a Wild.
Let the lockout be long and icy; icy enough that some NHL players go to Europe, where Czech, Swedish and Russian fans will rejoice in seeing their nations' best finally in their nations' arenas; and long enough that Canada shakes off its "America Junior" moniker, kidnaps its six NHL teams and starts its own league, where fans only stand for just one national anthem, but in two languages.
If the lockout leads to hockey returning to its homelands, I'm all for it. The U.S. markets that are worthwhile - New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Colorado and Chicago - will survive the work stoppage.
The ones that aren't - most of the rest - will die. And that's OK, because those like my roommate will have Buckeye football, Dodger baseball or, well, Gonzaga High cross country to focus on.
As for the half-dozen fans in Anaheim who just can't pick up and move on, I say this: Quack. Quack. Quack.
