from George Johnson of the Calgary Herald,

The most galling aspect of this turgid National Hockey League lockout melodrama is the utter inevitability of its ending; the predictable drawn-out charade of being played for saps, rubes, like a particularly hillbilly-ish tourist group from some backwater town trying to hail a couple of hacks in midtown Manhattan at Friday rush hour in the rain.

The eleventh-hour haggling followed by the Indiana Jones-like rescue just as the giant boulder seems set to surely crush whoever’s in its path.

Hmmmm, there’s a plot development we shoulda seen coming ...

You had to know deep within your sense of reason that the NHL and the Players Association would, for appearance sake if nothing else, need to inch ever closer to the very edge of the ledge, feel their toes wriggling off the side, actually see the pavement rising up from so many storeys below, to step back and save themselves. In spite of themselves.

They rather grandly refer to this laborious process as “negotiation.”

You may feel free to call it something else.

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