Bob Duff

They all should be ashamed of themselves.

The owners. The players.

Everybody.

The deal was there to be done and both sides refused to go the extra mile to make it happen.

"We have failed," was how Calgary Flames president and chief executive officer Ken King summed it up.

As he cancelled the season Wednesday, National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman described it as a "Sad and regrettable day."

You got that right.

Unable to close a $6.5 million gap on a proposed salary cap between offers, the NHL opted to wipe out an entire season.

Where they go from here is anybody’s guess, but the venom spewing from both sides after Wednesday’s cancellation indicated the only place they were headed was back to square one.

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Pull up a chair. Get comfortable. And please don’t hold your breath waiting for resolution to the NHL labor dispute.

It’s not coming anytime soon.

The owners’ concession to remove linkage from the process?

Off the table.

"What was on the table doesn’t make sense anymore," Bettman said. "We need linkage back because now we’re in a situation where we don’t know what our revenues will be.

"We have to regroup. At some point, we’re going to go back to the table, but I can’t tell you when."

The players’ bold step to accept a salary cap?

Long gone.

"At some point, concessions end and they ended here today," NHLPA executive director Bob Goodenow said.

"It’s a fresh start. Everything is off the table. The process is starting anew."

On this point, Goodenow and Bettman finally found a topic they could agree upon.

"What we do next is something we’re going to have to sit down and look at," said Bettman, not sounding like someone in a hurry to return to the talks.

Both sides came a long way during the negotiating process. The owners increased their salary cap from the low 30s to $42.5 million. The players put forth a 24 percent salary rollback and offered to play under a salary cap.

At the same time, it’s easy to ponder why it took so long for them to make these concessions — there was a deadline looming.

That deadline no longer exists and hockey people are again effusing rhetoric suggesting they’ve returned to their hard-line stances.

"We’re going to lose a whole season and maybe another and maybe another after that," Carolina Hurricanes owner Peter Karmanos said.

That’s why some in the game feel it’s imperative that the owners and players don’t allow the recent momentum developed to subside.

"They should set a June 1 deadline to get something done," said Chris Osgood, a free-agent goalie who played last season with the St. Louis Blues. "With all the things that go into setting up a season, you’re going to need at least three months to prepare."

Unfortunately, few share Osgood’s optimism.

"I don’t see the future being any brighter for everybody in six months from now or a year from now," Pittsburgh Penguins player-owner Mario Lemieux told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "It’s only going to get worse."

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