Because you can't spell "No one cares who the hell wins" without NHL

Seeing as the Red Sox are required by some obscure league rule to start a breathing human being regardless of talent tonight I am tuned in to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals.

This is only because How I Met Your Mother is on a repeat I've seen. Seriously, that is the only reason I went back to hockey before the third period. This is a pretty sad day for me.

Unlike Frank the Tank, I remember watching hockey (and the Blackhawks being shown the door by the St. Louis Blues year after year) as a kid. I came to the sport late and largely because of the the NHL series produced by Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis.

I remember trips to my grandfather's house in Michigan which meant I could swing by a sports card shop and open pack upon pack of hockey cards in the car all afternoon. There was a time where the only way I could remember locker combinations and phone numbers was to associate them with past and present Blackhawks. It was a pretty sick time.

From there, I picked up street hockey pretty easily and played anywhere I could when I was out of soccer season. From blacktop to the ice and back again if we could play for free, we'd drop the net on top of my Ford Taurus station wagon and head out to play for hours on end.

Some guys snuck out to drink or raise hell - we found a schoolyard, dropped the net and went to work.

My first paying gig in newspapers was Junior A hockey in Green Bay, which saw two or three players from that team make the NHL. Of course, by the time that happened, I'd all but abandoned the sport.

When you take a year of storm warnings about an impending strike and couple it with a pointless holdout that sees two losers - the players were forced to knuckle under to financial pressures and the owners who cried poor showed that they could go an entire year without revenue - it's not hard to imagine that hockey is seeing death's door-type numbers.

If I got a bad taste in my mouth over it, I can only imagine how the NASCAR set is reacting. For the NHL, this is an awful position, especially considering how they've been alienating Canadian fans for the better part of a decade now.

For the quick recap:

Me: Grew up in an Original Six city; played countless hours of both ice and street hockey; attended a college where hockey was the major sport; covered Junior A hockey; lived with a hockey mad roommate in DC.

Average fan: Is pretty sure hockey is played with a squashed ball and not a real ball.

Way to shit the bed on that one, NHL.

While I hesitate to offer my own proposal on how to save the NHL (and Frank hit it pretty much spot on - hockey and college athletics are about the only two things we can agree on) I think it boils down to everything the Tank said and these key points.

* More Canada, less Florida. A good rule here is that if you can't normally maintain ice outside at some point in the year, you can't have a hockey team

* Return Wayne Gretzky to the wild in Alberta

* Every third male born in Ontario must be named Dougie to help replenish Canada's natural supply of hockey players with hockey names (note: after some deliberation, Cam is also acceptable in place of Doug)

* Allow fans of the anal violation teams (mainly Chicago and Boston) to control the teams via the Internet like the Schaumburg Flyers

* Canadian commissioner, minimum of half the owners are Canadians and let's try to avoid "investment partnerships" in the future. This is a Canadian game and I think they're just too polite to tell everyone to stick it. Seriously, how would you feel if the commissioner of baseball was from Sweden? Pretty outraged, huh?

* More Darren Pang

* Less Barry Melrose

* More Barry Melrose mullet

In short, the big story line for me tonight is that you have an uber-small market in Edmonton fighting a sun-kissed new market team in Carolina. Guess who I'm pulling for here?

If I'm the commissioner, I start hyping the games like they were WWE matches. Play good versus evil, tradition versus American expansion. Add a little spice. I saw hundreds of hockey sticks in cars and minivans up here this winter and the rumor was that the city of Edmonton ran out of beer in the playoff run, so someone's watching here.

Lost in the shuffle have been fans and casual fans. The hard cores seem to have come back, even if it was slowly at first, but everyone below that level was happy to wave goodbye.

My only question is why the NHL hasn't tried to court some of us back with something along those lines. When it comes to making chicken soup out of chicken shit, the NHL is failing miserably.

(Photo from telus.net / geocities.com/caloilers / thgworldwide.com)