Mike Celizic

By not signing on the dotted line, the National Hockey League Players Association has thrown away much more than a hockey season.

The players' own lives won’t be the ones that suffer the most damage.

It’s a given that hockey isn’t the biggest blip on the national sports radar, and the lack of a season has hardly been noticed by the media and fans in general. But the damage that has already been inflicted on thousands of people who don’t earn in a year what even the lowest-paid players make in a couple of weeks is enormous.

With every game not played, scores of people who do the little things that allow games to be played don’t work. They are the ticket-takers and sellers, the people who collect parking fees and direct traffic, all those who work in the concession stands, the ushers, security guards, and janitors. Many are either retired and trying to supplement inadequate pensions and Social security or students who are struggling to get themselves through college.

They work by the hour, the game, or the hot dog, and they’re hurting. So, too, are the hundreds of employees in team offices who were told to go home and not to come back until there were games to be played and business to be done.

I’ve seen stories about bars and restaurants near arenas whose business depends on game traffic getting ready to shutter the windows, padlock the door and give up.

You’d have better luck selling thongs in Iran than NHL jerseys and gear in a sporting goods store.

These aren’t stories that get big coverage, but they’re important. Most of the people being hurt don’t show up in unemployment statistics. But the damage is deep, far deeper than it is for the players who took this season over the edge and into the abyss.

And not because there was no alternative. After nearly six months of insisting they would never accept a salary cap, the players and their fearless — and clueless — leader, Bob Goodenow, decided that, well, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing after all.

Anyone with a shred of sense would have realized months ago that it would come to this. The owners started with one objective, and they weren’t going to change. It was a salary cap or no deal.

Maybe there were other ways to get a deal done, but it doesn’t matter. The owners held all the cards all along. With the season dead, they’ll actually see some benefits.

For starters, without a collective bargaining agreement, they can use their free time to devise ways of speeding up the game and make it more appealing to fans. Then, in the fall, they can populate their training camps with replacement players and wait for the union members to start breaking ranks and crossing the lines. The NHL will have a season next year, but it will be on terms the owners impose, not an agreement the union negotiates.

But the players will see nothing. They have thrown away the year because Goodenow wasn’t perceptive enough to see that his refusal to even talk about a salary cap would get him nowhere but ruin.

They have thrown away the salaries they would have made. The points they don’t score, the saves they don’t make, the games they don’t play in, will never be made up.

They won’t kill the game. Leagues that go back nearly a century don’t just die, no matter how hard both sides try.

The NHL is damaged, but its small fan base is a strength; you don’t hear hockey fans saying they’re never going to another game as baseball fans say when their game takes a hiatus to allow players and owners to bicker about how they split the pot. NHL fans are dedicated fans, and they’ll be back.

And if they come back to a league structured more along the lines of the NFL, with its great competitive balance, it will be better for everyone. More teams will be able to compete. More teams will be able to survive.

The players have made a tragic miscalculation.