from Chris Johnston of Sportsnet,

“It’s almost hard to believe we’ve all been at this for a year and we’re still not done,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman told reporters Thursday. “We have had to live this day to day. We have had to react to things on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s positive tests, whether it’s contact tracing, whether it’s postponing games and then rescheduling them, so we never really had an opportunity to say, ‘Boy, this is taking a long time.’

“We were dealing with the here and now.”

They are now seeing fans trickle slowly back into 17 buildings and hearing about players getting vaccinated. They can start to imagine making money again.

And, as the league looks ahead to the brighter days on the horizon, it’s telling how much of its ambition is tied to restoring the comfort of what it once knew.

Bettman basically confirmed that the North Division will be a one-and-done experiment, saying that he envisioned a return to the previous alignment setup on the other side of the pandemic. That could happen as soon as next season, provided the Canadian government loosens border restrictions by the fall.

The NHL needs to be extra sensitive to the desires of its customers right now, and polling suggested that fans liked the Atlantic, Metropolitan, Central and Pacific Divisions as previously constructed.

“What we’re finding is two-thirds of our fans enjoyed what we did this year and about two-thirds of the fans think we should go back to what we have had more traditionally,” said Bettman. “And I think that’s about right. I think fans were very understanding and even excited in some respects about what we had to do in this unique season, but I think our traditional alignment makes more sense and is more widely accepted.”

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