from John Romano of the Tampa Bay Times,

...more than a week’s worth of hockey games have already been lost, and around here, that uncertainty has a familiar bleakness to it. Particularly for a man who has lived through the dismay of wondering what might have been.

Go back to the spring of 2005 and an NHL labor stoppage. The Lightning were the defending Stanley Cup champions but had not been back on the ice since their Game 7 victory against Calgary the previous June.

Like the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, the realization that more and more games would be lost and a postseason was in jeopardy played out like a slow-motion, low-budget horror film for then-Lightning general manager Jay Feaster.

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“You start off by hanging on any piece of information and any sort of hope or rumor that you hear,” said Feaster, who now runs the Lightning’s community hockey development program.

“You hear, ‘Well, it’s going to be X number of games in the season.’ And then, ‘Oh well, that deadline has passed. Now we can still play this many games.’ As you keep progressing, you realize you’re going to hit a point of no return, and that’s ultimately what happened.”

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