In a parallel universe, in which good faith tempers greed and unconditional love is rewarded, the Washington Capitals would be coming to town to play the Sabres Thursday night.
There would be vicious hits, miracle saves and elegant breakaway goals. The fans would chant. The goalies would fight. Hats would be thrown on the ice. We would exult as the Sabres, in the midst of their usual mid-winter win streak, take the game in overtime.
Instead, the arena will stay dark, and the NHL lockout will lurch into its 148th day. (Not that I'm keeping track or anything).
The hockey season has been on hold since Sept. 15 as players and owners argue over a salary cap. The owners say their costs are out of control. They want to cap team salaries. The players say they deserve a free market. No progress was made in last week's talks. It won't be long before they cancel the season.
The Sabres have a proud hockey tradition, and fans deeply miss their team. But if you watch the national sports media these days, reporting on the lockout is limited to snarky stories about how no one cares.
An ESPN.com poll concluded that three of four sports fans don't miss the NHL season. It's because America doesn't care about hockey, say pretty-boy talking heads who grew up in Sun Belt cities where ponds don't freeze over in winters.
If you hear anyone say that no one in the United States cares about hockey, then you know one thing for sure - they haven't been to Buffalo.
They weren't here on May 1, 1993 when Brad May scored a spectacular overtime goal to sweep the Boston Bruins in the first round of the playoffs. Sabres announcer Rick Jeanneret screamed "MAY DAY! MAY DAY! MAY DAY!" and delirious fans brandished brooms and tinfoil Stanley Cups.
They weren't here on April 14, 1996 when fans rose to their feet and cheered and cried in the last minutes of the final game in Memorial Auditorium, when Seymour Knox said "Farewell, old friend" and brought the blue and gold banners down. And they weren't here two days later when Sabres fans packed the Aud to the rafters again - for the unveiling of the team's new uniforms.
They weren't here in June 1999 when the Sabres beat the Leafs in the Eastern Conference final to make it to the Cup final, and thousands of fans rushed downtown, spent the night on the Perry Street concrete in hope of getting tickets, and threw a riot when the ticket windows closed.
They weren't here later that month after we lost the Cup, when my friend Jason and I joined tens of thousands of adoring fans, who packed Niagara Square to say "Thank you" to the team. They don't feel goosebumps when they hear Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance," or "La-La-La-La-La-LaFontaine!"
The way the U.S. media is covering the lockout - story after story about how fans don't miss the game - is an insult to fans in real hockey towns like Buffalo. It's also a sign of the same flawed thinking that got the league into this mess in the first place.
When New York lawyer Gary Bettman took over the NHL in the early 1990s, he began a push to make it into one of America's marquee pro sports, up there with the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.
He set out in search of big profits, partly by letting teams move out of small-market hockey towns like Winnipeg and Quebec City and expanding into American cities in the South and West, like Atlanta, Nashville and Raleigh. But people in the warm-weather states never took to hockey, and those franchises are losing money.
Bettman should never have expected hockey to have mass appeal in America. It's hard for towns to love a sport they have never played, and who plays hockey in states where snow hasn't covered the ground since the Ice Age? It's no surprise that America doesn't care about the lockout.
So, please, no more "nobody cares" stories from the media. If the Metropolitan Opera closed, or the New Yorker stopped printing, would it matter that a majority of Americans don't care, even though something big had been lost?
This is the real story of the lockout: Things fell apart in the hands of a small group of people who loved money more than they loved the game. Fans in real hockey towns have lost their game, a game driven into debt in the name of Americans in the South and West, who never cared to begin with.
So, enough snarky reports from the media about how hockey fans are few.
They may be few in the scheme of things, but they love their sport like no other fans. The real story is how greed has ruined their game.
