E-Mail This Article to a Friend NHL: No Hockey League BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

As the sun rises over Major League Baseball’s Cactus and Grapefruit League teams over the weekend, it is setting over the National Hockey League’s 2004-’05 season. Not since the NBA’s tall guys were locked out of pro arenas for two-plus months in 1998 has there been such a collective ho-hum exhaled by a sport’s fans.

Of course, here in New England, we have plenty of other distractions that keep us from over-lamenting the loss of pro hockey, but elsewhere the void was felt more significantly. Think about places like Montreal (a city that just lost its MLB team and saw its CFL franchise, the freakin’ Alouettes, choke in the playoffs after a 14-4 regular season), or Columbus (its Ohio State football team was relegated to the Alamo Bowl just two years after winning the national championship), or Nashville, Raleigh, Vancouver, Ottawa, San Jose, Vancouver, or Buffalo. Those metropolises didn’t have a pair of Super Bowls and a World Series to savor this past winter; in most cases, their hockey joneses had to be sated with pee-wee tournaments and occasional re-viewings of Miracle.

Nope, those cities’ pro fans had little to embrace except for the prospect of the NHL season opening, and then it never did. Luckily for us, the owners and players’ association were so stubborn and intransient in their negotiations that hockey krishnas never even got the opportunity to get their hopes up as far as a resolution went. Hockey fans were fairly warned months, even years, ago about the possibility of a labor shutdown; it came to bitter fruition when training camps didn’t open in September, and then — through shamefully intermittent and fruitless bargaining —the regular season began to slip away.

Perhaps some people around here genuinely did miss pro hockey, but I haven’t encountered many, and when NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman pulled the plug on the season on Thursday, it had long ago been viewed as a fait accompli by most of the sport’s followers. Once the players’ union finally made concessions and accepted (if not embraced) a salary cap, the lords of hockey had already been forced to consider the prospect of a 28-game schedule — a concept so patently ridiculous that Lord Stanley of Preston himself must have been rolling over in his icebox (as if he hadn’t done a few triple axels already last spring when Tampa Bay won his eponymous Cup).

So the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2005 will have no pro hockey to speak of. Big deal. And if that attitude is as pervasive as it seems to be, then harsh ramifications await. If I’m a player, I realize that following the lead of the union’s negotiators like a lemming was a critical mistake. Even casual hockey fans knew that the owners bloc wasn’t going to capitulate this time (as it did in January 1995), and while the team owners certainly didn’t drape themselves with glory throughout this mess either, it still appeared that they were the saner ones.

Yes, the owners got themselves into this quagmire, but that didn’t mean that they should have been forced to keep the runaway train going unabated until small-market teams collapsed and the whole league landed in the penalty box of bankruptcy. The NFL and NBA implemented salary caps, and both leagues have flourished; most people outside the Tri-State area would agree that MLB needs one, too. For some reason, the NHL and its players couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp the long-range need for some kind of fiscal restraint, and since the owners had caved a decade ago, the players figured they could stand pat and wait out the inevitable. In retrospect, that stance has cost them — big-time — and will continue to do so for years to come, methinks.

This isn’t a league that has big-time stars that can survive such a lengthy shutdown. There haven’t been any Gretzkys or Orrs or even prime-time Lemieuxs or Jagrs for quite a while now (when the Lightning’s Martin St. Louis is the NHL’s marquee player — trust me, you’re in trouble), and hockey is very much a regional sport anyway. People in Kansas and Montana and Alabama don’t care about hockey, and they wouldn’t know the difference between a two-line pass and Patrick Pass. Of the big four sports nationally, one would even hesitate to qualify hockey in that fraternity, since NASCAR and golf have arguably overtaken the Greatest Game on Ice in terms of overall popularity.

Now what? The few and hardy fans who packed (hah!) the 30 arenas beforehand are a lot less likely to come out when and if the season resumes this fall. (And getting a deal done now — to ensure that marketing strategies to reclaim alienated fans can begin immediately — is paramount to the short-term prospects of this damaged league.) NHL owners will be forced to avoid thinking altogether about raising ticket prices, even though they’ve taken a financial bath by losing the current season; instead, they’ll have to reach out lovingly not only to the disgusted season-ticket holders, but to the casual fan who had only marginal interest to begin with (and who will continue to stay away as long as $48 balcony seats and $6 beers are de rigueur at the YourNameHereCenter). The hopefully humbled players will need to make do with less, all the while making a much bigger commitment to fan-outreach programs and promoting the game itself.

But the damage has been done, perhaps irreversibly. A sport that appealed to only a fringe constituency saw its players take it upon themselves to get overly greedy — a character flaw in itself in the face of Patriots-esque unselfishness and success — and make so little effort to negotiate in good faith that whatever fans they had before have grown accustomed to life without pro hockey. And that’s not even taking into account the inherent flaws in the game that saw goal-scoring down and clutching-and-grabbing tactics continue to go unpunished; hockey had become boring and without marquee names prior to the lockout, and what in the name of Frank J. Zamboni will it become now — with a 16-month gap having made the NHL virtually irrelevant?

Short of a miraculous marketing campaign to recapture an estranged fandom, the NHL will become known not only as the No Hockey League of 2004-’05, but given the real possibility of the ultimate demise of the league, younger fans may someday refer to it as the Never Heard-of-It League as well.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com, and Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com