Oct. 8 - It’s not for me to tell anyone, much less two all-time greats like Mark Messier and Mario Lemieux to hang them up. But that doesn’t mean I expect to derive much enjoyment from watching them grind through what will probably be their final seasons with teams that are going nowhere.

Melancholy hangs like fog on a frozen country pond over the 2003-04 NHL season, whose first few weeks will sneak all but unnoticed through the roil of the baseball playoffs and the NFL’s midseason run.

A few months after the season expires with the Stanley Cup finals next spring, so will the collective bargaining agreement between the game’s players and owners. With the league hemorrhaging money, two teams recovering from bankruptcy, no significant national television money, and ticket prices soaring past the grasp of many fans, few expect the game to return until sometime in 2005, after what is expected to be a bitter lockout.

That alone is enough to depress hockey fans. The prospect of Mess and Mario finishing out their long and glorious careers fighting just to make the playoffs one more time, with no hope of playing for Lord Stanley’s silver punch bowl, just makes it worse.

It’s not hard to understand why Messier keeps at it. He’s 43 years old and this is his 25th season in the NHL. That’s nearly 60 percent of his life spent playing at the highest level of the game. Add in all the years that he played as a peewee and junior and everything in between, and there’s probably not a time that he can remember doing anything else.

During his career, he’s done enough for two teams — the Oilers and the Rangers — to have his number retired by both. Although he came to New York after his greatest days with Edmonton, where he teamed with Wayne Gretzky on one of the game’s legendary outfits, Rangers fans think of him as their own. He, after all, brought the Cup back to New York in 1994, 54 years after it had last resided there.

The fact that the Rangers have not made the playoffs for the past six seasons — a record drought for the Broadway Blues — doesn’t weaken the devotion Ranger fans have to him. Though he has been hobbled by injuries and reduced to checking-line status on the team, he is still a leader in the locker room and on the ice. And with six more points, he will pass Gordie Howe and trail only Gretzky in NHL career scoring

Mark Messier's New York Rangers have missed the playoffs the last six seasons.

The Rangers have not gotten significantly better over the off-season. Glen Sather, their general manager, took over from Bryan Trottier as coach last year and led the team — if that’s the word — to a record one game better than .500. He’s back, but injured Pavel Bure isn’t. And the team’s centers are still led by Eric Lindros, who hasn’t had a great season since he was in Philadelphia, and Bobby Holik, the $9-million checker.

The Rangers have some good prospects in the system, particularly defenseman Fedor Tjutin, but they are still weak at the blue line, more so with Brian Leetch starting the season on the disabled list with yet another ankle injury. And in today’s NHL, if you aren’t strong on the blue line, you’re not going anywhere.

InsertArt(2035593)The Penguins’ problems are different. While the Rangers spend tons of money to little effect, Lemieux, who owns the team he plays for, has no money. Some feel he continues to play despite a back that frequently sends him to the bench because he knows he can sell more tickets if he’s on the ice than if he’s in an executive suite.

That may be. The impecunious Penguins are so strapped for cash, they are even thinking of selling the land on which they once hoped to build a new arena. If the Rangers’ hopes of making the playoffs are slim, the Penguins’ are none.

Messier was great. Lemieux was brilliant. Perhaps no one has ever had his shooting ability, and only Gretzky’s incomparable skills as a playmaker keep him ahead of Lemieux on top of most lists of the game’s all-time greats. Still, if you needed one goal on a breakaway to win a title, even Gretzky would choose Lemieux to take the shot.

He’s been through cancer and he’s retired and unretired and fought his aching back. Now, 19 years after he began his career, Lemieux is more a highlight film than an integral part of a team; a snippet of brilliance flashing now and again, impressing itself on the mind’s eye, and then fading from view.

With the Penguins not expected to be good, Lemieux will hardly be noticed except by the fans in the arenas he visits. He will score more than Messier, mean more to his team on the ice. But with a team that is going no where, it really won’t matter.

They’re two of the best to ever play the game, and they’re hanging on now, wringing one last year from the game that has been their lives. We might miss them more when they’re gone if they weren’t all but gone already.

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Mike Celizic writes regularly for NBCSports.com and is a freelance writer based in New York