Daryl Stone / AP FILE

Get a good look at this picture. It might be the only time NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, left, and NHL players' executive director Bob Goodenow have shared a laugh together.

As absurd as it is to hold a 28-game hockey season, I’m not going to tell the NHL and its players to scrap the year. But there are two items that need to be scrapped right now if there’s to be any hope of having even the smudge of a season that’s still on the table.

Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow.

These are the two bullheaded bozos who have brought the NHL to the brink of annihilation, Bettman, the commissioner who is intent on planting his heel on the players’ union, and Goodenow, the players association executive director who won’t accept reality.

From the moment the lockout was imposed at the beginning of what was supposed to have been training camp, the season was all but doomed and the league was on a fast track to horrendous damage that may never be repaired. And it was all because of Bettman and Goodenow.

Neither of them entered the sporadic negotiations with the desire to reach a settlement. Rather, they came in welded to positions that were mutually exclusive.

And now they’re reaping the negative rewards of their foolish stubbornness. Instead of worrying about saving their game, they’re determined to save what they view as their honor and the rest of us view as blind, self-serving stupidity.

Hockey fans don’t give a hoot about who wins this battle. It will be a Pyrrhic victory anyway, one won at such cost that it won’t have been worth the fighting. Salary cap, luxury tax, revenue sharing — if you’re a fan, they’re all just words. What the fans know is the same thing the league and the players know. That is that the NHL is in serious financial trouble and needs to find a way to rein in costs so that it can continue to attempt to become something more than the boutique sport it is.

But they are willing to sacrifice the season, and maybe the league, to principles that never made any sense to start with. They would rather die than admit that their adversary has a legitimate point to make.

If you’re an owner, you don’t need Bettman. You need someone with vision and intellect, someone who can find creative solutions to gnarly problems, not someone who considers it a virtue to be as rigid — and as imaginative — as an oak.

If you’re the players, you don’t need Goodenow. He’s led you down a dead-end path, intent not on protecting your livelihoods but on defeating a commissioner for whom he has as much love and respect as Fox has for intellectual program content.

And if the owners and players can’t get rid of these two human roadblocks, then there is still time to lock them in a room and threaten to send in Todd Bertuzzi with a hockey stick if they don’t agree to find some compromise — immediately — that will allow you to have your itty-bitty season.

There is no season, so there is no reason to return to the bargaining table until it’s time for training camp to begin at the end of the summer.

The NHL owners will make plans for replacement players next year. Some union members will cross the lines to play and collect a paycheck. Eventually, the union will cave in and come back, but they will bring with them acrimony and resentment.

They will come back to a league that has an even smaller fan base than it now has, and it will be years before the damage is repaired, if it can be repaired.

And all because two people have their feet planted so firmly in the ground they’re willing to give up the game they profess to love rather than be seen as the person who first blinked.

Those two people — Goodenow and Bettman — have to go. The sooner, the better.

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