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This is it. This is finally it.

After teasing us, off and on, these past 48 hours with a vague hope that sanity might ultimately prevail, the National Hockey League and the NHL players' association retreated back into their respective bunkers Friday, failing once again to find any common ground to forge a new collective bargaining agreement and possibly salvage some part of the 2004-05 regular season.

The obligation, for commissioner Gary Bettman, is now clear.

In the next 48 hours, he needs to call together the NHL board of governors (either in person or by conference call); brief them on the state of the negotiations (dead in the water still); and set a Tuesday deadline for canceling the season. That would give his NHLPA counterpart, Bob Goodenow, one last chance to caucus with his membership to see if they wanted to shift away from their philosophical starting point - a "marketplace" system that would permit any team to spend any amount of money on payroll, subject to a luxury tax once a team exceeded a pre-determined spending threshold. In the meantime, Bettman could canvass his ownership group to ensure that they remain committed to a system that links player salaries to league-wide revenues.

This is where the stalemate began in August, when the two sides formally bellied up to the bargaining table, and this is where the stalemate exists now, nearly six months later.

The chance of either side budging off its philosophical starting point is nil, so it is up the league to take the next logical step: Cancel the season, put an end to this sham of a negotiation and provide closure on the most contentious chapter in the history of NHL labor negotiations.

In some ways, analyzing the events of the past few days was like being a China watcher in the Mao era. The regime would send out vague signals to the West, which would be duly interpreted by political analysts.

On Thursday, there were three clear signals to interpret: One, the fact that the two sides met for nine hours into the Manhattan evening, without engaging in any name-calling after the fact. Two, the loveable blabbermouth, Jeremy Roenick, suggested the players could accept a salary cap, provided its parameters were more reasonable than the ones set out in the last NHL proposal. Three, the Islanders' Mike Peca scolded both sides for taking such extreme positions at the start of the negotiating process, which left them with little real wiggle room once they started to trade proposals.

Peca's words, in an interview with Newsday, are worth repeating here. He said: "It's tough going into a negotiation saying you're never going to accept something. This isn't me saying that it's all good and dandy, let's sign the [NHL's] deal. I'm just saying it's always hard to go into a negotiation saying, 'I'm never going to accept that.' Because then you're not giving yourself much room to negotiate. I think both sides are guilty of that."

Yes they were.

This comment was worth repeating as well:

"The main concern amongst players ... is two years go by and then what?" Peca said. "Are we going to get a deal that we want in two years? That's debatable. I think both sides feel that for both sides to get the best deal, it's to get it done now, not the future."

Peca, it should be noted, is a hawk on the players' side. Once, earlier in his career, he sat out an entire season in a contract dispute with the Buffalo Sabres. The fact that he was taking issue with the negotiating strategies of both sides in the dispute was noteworthy and sent a signal - that the NHLPA should at least be looking at the NHL's proposal and seeing if there wasn't something there that would be a starting point for compromise.

Of course, the fatal flaw in that logic is that these talks were taking place in the first week of February. In a normal year, two-thirds of the games would have been played already. This is hardly the time to be stuck in the starting gate.

Accordingly, the best thing the league can do now is set a drop-dead date, something Bettman has been reluctant to do up until now.

There is no hope remaining and no point in dragging this charade on any longer. Eventually, the league is going to have to win back its client base, one paying customer at a time, and this is as good a place as any to start. After all, in a globeandmail.com poll held a little more than a week ago, the fans voted overwhelmingly against playing a shortened season. The sample was enormous (21,215 site visitors paused to register a vote) and the numbers were decisive - 2,688 in favor of playing a truncated schedule, 18,527 against. As Ray Davies once said, it's time to give the people what they want.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HARVE - Former tough guy Neil Sheehy, who played 379 NHL games for three teams over a nine-year span, provides an interesting perspective on the state of the game - as played on the ice, if anyone can remember that far back - on his website sheehyhockey.com. Sheehy, now a player agent who represents, among others, the Calgary Flames' Jordan Leopold and the New York Islanders' Jason Blake, begins by providing an unusual mea culpa - that the tactics he used to badger, bother and otherwise annoy Wayne Gretzky and the other members of the Edmonton Oilers' championship teams, started the NHL down a slippery slope that ultimately resulted in the current dead-puck era. Sheehy, takes a long time to get to the point, but when he does, it's an interesting one - that when the league introduced the instigator penalty, it allowed and even encouraged players to do whatever they could to get the top stars off their collective games. Sheehy writes that after the instigator penalty came in, "I was not held accountable for my tactics like I had been my first couple of years as a player. The rules now protected me and I was able to use them to make my game more effective by neutralizing the skill of opposing forwards." Sheehy continues: "This began a shift in how the game was played throughout the NHL, a process which continued to evolve in the last 20 years … Because the NHL allowed such tactics without individual player accountability, an increasing number of players adopted this style, which legally shuts down the best offensive players (and) also eliminates a great degree of skill from the game." Sheehy also talks about how the NHL promoted "high-impact body contact in the hopes of attracting a national television audience." Instead, the league found itself facing a concussion epidemic, in which "charging and head-hunting" slowly became acceptable styles of body contact. Sheehy's conclusion: That if the rulebook were enforced, "skilled players will have more of an opportunity to play a skilled game; and there will be fewer injuries, fewer concussions and hockey will benefit at all levels." Sheehy was nicknamed 'Harve' in his playing days because he was one of the few players from Harvard University to make it to the NHL.

IN BRIEF - They may not have the cache of the Jamaican bobsled team yet, but a quartet of hockey players from the Cayman Islands will surely capture some of the public's imagination at the world pond hockey championships, to be played in Plaster Rock, N.B. later this month. The four are all Canadian ex-pats working in a variety of industries in the Cayman Islands, where there are no arenas with ice-making capabilities. As a result, the Cayman Islands Breakaways, who normally stick to ball hockey, are spending their weekends traveling north to find ice in cities such as Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and Miami. The idea to compete in the tournament came to Bill Messer of Tisdale, Sask. when he read about it on the Internet. Tisdale once played for Saskatchewan in the 1979 Canada Cup midget tournament and has been living in the Caymans for more than a decade, working in the financial services industry. His teammates in the four-on-four tournament are Marty Goschl (Oshawa), Norm Klein (Sault Ste. Marie) and Joe Stasiuk (Toronto). Klein was reportedly a minor atom teammate of future Hall Of Famer Ron Francis. Just how will the Cayman Islanders do? "I think we'll be able to hold our own," said Messer, in a statement. "We certainly wouldn't be going if we weren't able to give everything we've got" … Another lockout victim: John Tortorella's gardener. According to a report in The Hockey News, with so much time on his hands, Tortorella decided to take over the lawn work at his family home in Tampa. "I've trimmed everything I could possibly trim in the backyard," he said. "We fired our guy who cuts the grass and I cut the grass now" … Here's an ominous development. A week ago, the Philadelphia Flyers sent out a press release saying that coach Ken Hitchcock would spend a good deal of February and March involved in a new program, called 'get hooked on hockey with Hitch.' The program will ask Hitchcock to run clinics twice a week for adult and teen players at the Flyers' Skate Zones in February and March. The scheduled calls for Hitchcock to be on the ice every Monday and Saturday throughout the two months. Presumably, his participation hinges on whether he needs to be behind the Flyers' bench at any of those times … Rangers' goaltender Dan Blackburn was scheduled to play his first game since the 2002-03 season Friday night for the Victoria Salmon Kings of the ECHL. Blackburn, a former first-round draft choice who played 31 games in the NHL as an 18-year-old, has been sidelined for almost two years as a result of nerve damage to his left shoulder. The damage is considered permanent, but Blackburn is hoping that he can continue his professional career, using a specially modified catching mitt. The glove looks like a traditional blocker, but it does include a small glove, under the blocking pad that will help him catch dump-ins and freeze the puck. Blackburn has limited movement in his left arm, which may prevent him from cleanly catching the puck on high, hard shots. Blackburn's original injury came in the weight room, not on the ice, and at this stage of his career, the Rangers are unsure if he can ever get back to NHL form. The fact that the Rangers used their No. 1 choice, sixth overall, in last year's entry draft to select University of Michigan goaltender Al Montoya suggests that they may not.

AND FINALLY - From the where-are-they-now department?: Former Chicago Blackhawks' left winger Al Secord, once a 54-goal scorer with the 1982-83 edition of the team, is now a commercial pilot for American Airlines, living in Dallas. How did Secord become a pilot? "When I was a teenager, I used to fight forest fires for the Ministry of Natural Resources in Ontario," he said. "Being on the ground, I always watched the water bombers dropping their loads and putting out the fires and I thought, 'that would be a great job for me after hockey was over.' From there, I got my private flying license in the mid-1980s." Secord's NHL career wrapped up in 1989-90 and he spent four years away from the game, before returning to play with the AHL Chicago Wolves for two years (94-95 and 95-96). At that point, he began to pursue a full-time career with the airline. Secord lives in Dallas, which is an American Airlines hub, and he flies to Mexico, the United States and to Canada. He flies an 83-hour month, which enables to spend up to two weeks of every month at home with his family. In the summers, he returns to Canada, vacationing on the Manitoulin Island. "I go back three or four times during the off-season. Did I say off-season? I mean summertime. My mom and dad are up there on the lake, so I try to get my wife and kids up there in the summer. It gets pretty hot down in Dallas in July and August. A number of ex-Blackhawks settled in Dallas (for years, it was the home of their minor-league affiliate), but apart from the odd old-timers game, the 46-year-old Secord doesn't get on the ice much anymore. "I've only skated twice this year. I'm so busy with my family and the flying. There's not a whole lot of hockey down in Dallas, as far as the men's leagues go." Blessedly, there is little coverage of the lockout either. "I know there are people down there who are suffering because there's no hockey and they are really missing it. We've got a lot of transient people who've moved into the Dallas area, a lot of northerners and of course, a lot of Canadian guys who settled there because they played in Chicago's farm system, when it was based in Dallas. We don't get much (coverage) in the paper. We get a little blurb in the USA Today and that's about it."