If all goes according to plan, a scaled-down draft is expected to be held later this month and training camps will open in September from Vancouver to Miami. NHL games will be back on the schedule in October.

“It’ll be a great thing to get the game back up,” Columbus Blue Jackets coach Gerard Gallant said.

Selling the sport might take a while longer.

During the lockout, disgruntled Buffalo fan Doug Sitler sold more than 15,000 magnetic car ribbons that read: “I need my hockey fix(ed).”

“I think it’s going to take a little bit of time for people to get back in the swing of things,” he said. “But sports fans are pretty fickle. They have short memories. They really do.”

It took all night and then some for the final round of negotiations to produce an agreement.

The sides met for 10 straight days in New York, and it became clear Wednesday morning — the 301st day of the lockout — that they weren’t going to leave the room without an agreement.

The expected salary cap probably will have a ceiling of $39 million and a minimum around $22 million.

Player salaries will not exceed 54 percent of league-wide revenues, expected to be around $1.8 billion. Players will also put money into escrow, and after each season that will be used to balance out the set percentage based on actual revenues.

Bettman warned in February that offers the union passed up were better than any it would see once a year of hockey was lost.

Just days before the season was wiped out, the players’ association said for the first time it would accept a salary cap if the league dropped its desire to link player costs to revenues.

That started a wild week that included the cancellation of the season Feb. 16 and a false hope three days later that it would be saved. Even Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux — superstars turned executives — couldn’t resurrect it during an emergency bargaining session in New York.

Negotiations resumed in mid-March.

Bettman promised “cost certainty” in the form of a hard salary cap to the owners and he has gotten it.

The landscape of the NHL will be quite different than it was in June 2004 when the Tampa Bay Lightning skated off with the Stanley Cup in the league’s last game before the lockout. For the first time since a flu epidemic in 1919, there was no Stanley Cup champion in 2005.

When the league relaunches in the fall, it will do so with a new salary structure that keeps high-spending teams such as Detroit, Toronto, Philadelphia and the New York Rangers in check.

The first order of business after ratification will be to get a majority of the players signed. The belief is that last season’s contracts will be wiped from the books, leaving many players without deals.

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