from Bryan Curtis at Grantland,

Last Wednesday, as the temperature dipped below 25 degrees in New York, a bunch of Canadians were staring at a door. The door is located at 1185 Sixth Avenue. Behind it are the offices of the National Hockey League. The Canadians wore heavy parkas. They carried notebooks and mics and they shivered and sipped coffee. People stopped and asked what they were doing, staring at a door. The Canadians told them: They were waiting for Bettman.

Gary Bettman is the commissioner of the NHL. (A lot of people on Sixth Avenue didn't seem to know this.) NHL players had been locked out for 100 days, the third work stoppage of Bettman's tenure, and now the whole season was in jeopardy. (Some passersby looked skeptical and asked, "Is Obama in there?") For NHL reporters — and me, an uninvited embed — the lockout had entered its surreal final days.

"It's absurd," said Darren Dreger, a reporter for the Canadian station TSN. "We're standing on a street corner in Manhattan, in sub-zero conditions, waiting for a kernel of information."

"It is soul-sucking," said Pierre LeBrun, Dreger's TSN colleague and an ESPN contributor. "It really is soul-sucking."

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