from Ken Dryden at the Globe and Mail,

It’s hard to believe that Bettman doesn’t see the damage being done.

It’s hard to believe that Fehr doesn’t see that standing up and fighting back, that pride without an agreement, won’t hold for long.

It’s hard to believe that both the owners and players are so tied up in the rightness of their own side and the wrongness of the other guys that they can’t see the earth they’re both scorching. It’s hard to believe that both Bettman and Fehr, the owners and players, can’t see that no season, no victory.

If up until now the back and forth between them is just a scenario that both Bettman and Fehr have had to play out, if both of them have things truly in hand for a signed agreement at the right moment and there is a season, sorry for all this fuss. Or as Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live would say, “Never mind.”

But if this isn’t just a scenario, if they think the issues that divide them are worthy of another cancelled year, if the season is truly at risk – they’re wrong. The owners may own the teams. They may have the right to put on games or not. The players may have the right to play or not.

But neither of them has the right to mess up what other players and other owners have created, what players and fans of all sorts, everywhere, have created over so many years.

With the fans, what is lost is lost. And for the owners and players what is lost with the fans may prove far more than whatever else is won.

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