updated 4:28 a.m. ET Feb. 17, 2005

NEW YORK - The NHL canceled its season exactly five months after the lockout started. Now there’s no telling when there will be games again.

“We’re planning to have hockey next season,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said Wednesday.

That won’t be easy.

Last-gasp negotiations got the league and the players’ association close to a settlement, but not close enough to prevent the cancellation of the season Wednesday.

The issue that kept the sides apart at the end is the same one that has divided them since this fight started long ago — the inability to resolve differences over a salary cap.

“The guys I’ve talked to in the last 24 hours were hoping it was canceled, not to see it canceled, but we’ve missed basically all of our paychecks anyway,” Nashville forward Jim McKenzie said. “We’ve offered too much and gone too far to a group that really hasn’t tried to move.”

For the first time, a major pro sports league in North America has lost an entire season to a labor dispute. The resulting damage could be immeasurable to hockey, which already has limited appeal in the United States.

To begin with, all momentum gained in the final days of negotiations has been lost — late offers that broke down barriers are now off the table.

“This is a sad, regrettable day that all of us wish could have been avoided,” Bettman said.

“Every day that this thing continues, we don’t think it’s good for the game,” NHLPA executive director Bob Goodenow said in Toronto.

No Stanley Cup champion will be crowned, the first time that’s happened since 1919, when the 2-year-old league called off the finals because of a flu epidemic.

Without an agreement, there can be no June draft. The sport’s heralded next big thing, Canadian phenom Sidney Crosby, won’t pull on his first NHL sweater anytime soon.

Then there is the parade of aging stars — Mario Lemieux (39), Mark Messier (44), Steve Yzerman (39) Brett Hull (40), Ron Francis (41), Dave Andreychuk (41) and Chris Chelios (43) — whose playing days could be ending on someone else’s terms.

“This is a tragedy for the players,” Bettman said. “Their careers are short and this is money and opportunity they’ll never get back,” Bettman said.

Despite being the NHL’s best-known star, there was never a chance that Pittsburgh’s Lemieux, the first owner-player in modern American pro sports history, would side with the players.

“A few years ago, I thought the owners were making a lot of money and were hiding some under the table, but then I got on this side and saw the losses this league was accumulating,” he said Wednesday.

Hockey was already a distant fourth on the popularity scale among the nation’s major league sports. The NHL lost the first season of its two-year broadcasting agreement with NBC that was supposed to begin this season, a revenue-sharing deal in which the network is not even paying rights fees.

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