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'We are truly sorry," commissioner Gary Bettman said as he finally, and officially, cancelled the National Hockey League season that never was.

Sorry, indeed.

In the rink where Wayne Gretzky once played the game the way it was intended to be played, there was only hard concrete in mid-February. Far below the banners that recognize the Edmonton Oilers' five Stanley Cups -- a trophy that will now not be hoisted anywhere this year -- six stationary bicycles stood outside the hockey dressing room, not a player in sight to continue spinning the wheels that, for far too long, have gone nowhere anyway.

Sorry, indeed.

It will be the first time since 1919, the commissioner said from the television monitor, that the Stanley Cup will not be awarded.

Back then, it was cancelled because the players were sick.

This year -- even by the commissioner's own admission -- it is the game that is sick.

And it is the fans who are no longer willing to stomach an endless fight they cannot relate to in any possible way, a battle they see, when they even bother to look, as between rich greedy players and greedy rich owners over what was once, but is most assuredly no longer, a $2.1-billion industry.

In the end, there was only minor panic among some players and some owners -- a few last, desperate reaches for a deal that was never to be -- but there was, surprisingly, never the anticipated panic from desperate Canadian fans to see Hockey Night in Canada return to its rightful spot on Saturday night television.

For some time now, Canadians have carefully and deliberately differentiated between the NHL game and the national game.

Both might be called hockey, but they have increasingly less in common. The NHL game may have been killed yesterday, but the national game is as alive as ever, perhaps even more so this winter as fans have turned to the games at hand rather than the games at the end of the remote control.

They played shinny on frozen Lake Louise this week. They played road hockey in Vancouver. They played pond hockey in New Brunswick. In every non-NHL rink in the country, men and women of all ages played the game almost continually, the magical hockey that can only be played in a child's imagination.

And the death of the NHL season had not the slightest effect on any of it.

Our guy is Marc Ducharme, 29, one of the sales managers at Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise.

"Frustration was certainly my initial feeling," said Mr. Ducharme, of Banff, one of the many shinny players on Lake Louise yesterday afternoon as the 2004-05 NHL season was shut down permanently.

"I missed it up until January, but to be honest we started playing more of our own hockey and moved on.

"That's the way most Canadians are, I'd say."

Back in Ottawa, businessman Stan Thompson watched the players' union news conference that followed the league news conference, each side trying to explain the inexplicable and defend the indefensible, and said what many other lifelong fans will be saying this morning: "As far as I'm concerned, they can stay out as long as they like."

In December, already fed up with what he perceived to be a battle of greed that had nothing to do with the game or its fans, Mr. Thompson demanded his money back from the Ottawa Senators. Ever since the franchise was reborn in 1992, he had been in the stands, cheering, most recently from two seats along the rail that cost him $9,800 a season.

What Mr. Thompson discovered this winter of hockey's discontent was precisely what former star goaltender and current federal cabinet minister Ken Dryden predicted might happen. Fans, Mr. Dryden said recently, could easily discover that following NHL hockey was merely a habit and not a passion for them, and they might never return if turned away. Mr. Thompson has found other uses for his entertainment dollar and has concluded he has been getting more value for his money.

"Honestly, no," Mr. Thompson said. "I haven't missed it at all.

"They've got to fix it before I come back." To many disenchanted fans, the silver lining in the dark cloud that has rumbled over the NHL since Sept. 15 was Mr. Bettman's admission that the NHL game requires far more fixing than merely its economics.

Had a last-minute deal been struck between the owners and players, the commissioner said, he would have held a profoundly different news conference, one in which he would have offered a "laundry list" of immediate rule changes aimed at making the game more entertaining.

Many fans, Mr. Thompson included, would wish the changes to go even further than "opening up" the on-ice game to less clutching and fewer defensive tactics. They want a smaller league than the current 30 teams.

The NHL, they say, should die permanently in anywhere from six to 10 cities, all American based.

"Nashville? Carolina? Florida?" Mr. Thompson said. "What's the point of us topping them up with equalization payments if it isn't going to work anyway?"

Had the collective bargaining agreement never been extended five years to enable the league to participate in the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics, this crisis might well have occurred at the worst possible time for Canadian franchises.

With the Canadian dollar flirting with 62 cents and United States locations openly wooing franchises to move south, it was once suggested only the Toronto Maple Leafs were certain to survive into the 21st century.

In only a few years, however, U.S. alternatives dried up, as did American network television for NHL hockey, the Canadian dollar came back and hockey has been forced to accept it is a gate-driven sport that will only thrive where true fans reside.

Who knows, but before all this is over, the Phoenix Coyotes may decide to relocate to Winnipeg.

Perhaps they could even call themselves the Jets.

As for the Edmonton Oilers -- often considered the weakest of the six Canadian franchises -- president Pat LaForge came on right after the league commissioner to say that, one day, the ice will go back in and the Oilers will again skate out under their treasured banners.

"We're here today because the business is sick," Mr. LaForge conceded.

All, it appears, now agree on that point. The players want too much. The owners feel they give up too much. The fans feel they get too little for the price they are expected to pay. What this day marked, Mr. LaForge suggested, was "an end to the insanity" and, by necessity, a beginning to a new way of conducting that business.

"We will be back once again," he predicted.

Sitting beside Mr. LaForge, Oilers general manager Kevin Lowe said that he felt as numb this day as he had that day back in August of 1988 when the Edmonton Oilers traded away his friend and teammate, Wayne Gretzky.

The Oilers survived that and went on to win yet one more Stanley Cup.

The game, Mr. Lowe said, "will survive" this.

But, he added -- though it was hardly necessary -- it is going to take "a lot of work."

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