It’s been nearly two weeks since the long-starved hockey fans of Southwest Florida got to celebrate the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Stanley Cup. The hockey season is over – trouble is, we don’t know when it will start again.

The National Hockey League’s agreement with its players expires in three months. The NHL Players Association – the group that represents those players collectively – is not engaged in any conversation with the league at this time. That’s very bad news. With the clock ticking, the two sides are snoozing.

In case you’ve forgotten what this is all about, it’s about team owners trying to protect themselves from themselves. The owners want “cost certainty,” meaning a limit to how much a team can spend on its players. They want this because they’ve been spending far too much on players for far too long.

Even the Bruins have lavished out incredibly large sums of money on incredibly mediocre talent, more than $12 million on Martin Lapointe, Sean O’Donnell, Travis Greene, and Rob Zamuner alone. This from a team that has been criticized for being too cheap to bring a championship to Boston.

Year after year, the New York Rangers boast the largest payroll in the league, and they haven’t made the playoffs in seven years. Money can’t buy love, happiness or, apparently, the Stanley Cup.

Big-league sports owners have always been unable to resist throwing heaping piles of money on star players. If they lose out on the A-list stars, they’ll throw obscene sums at the B-list. Or the C-list. Whatever it takes to show the fan base the team is going for it. Tom Hicks, who gave Alex Rodriguez $25 million a year to play shortstop for the Rangers, also gave Bill Guerin $36 million to play four years of hockey for the Stars. In each case, he boasted that his team was ready to go for it.

Of course, A-Rod is now a Yankee, and the Stars have been offered up for sale.

Things look bleak. Everyone knows the NHL is in big-time trouble. NBC just became the league’s broadcast home, and will televise games whenever the league gets back to work. To earn this right, the network had to guarantee nothing. Zero. Not a penny These kind of deals are usually reserved for soccer and arena football, not for one of the “big four” leagues.

Even the players admit something needs to be changed. The problem is the solution the owners are offering. The league wants a hard cap similar to the one found in the NFL. In this scenario, each team would be allowed to spend X amount of money on players each season without going over. The league is talking about a figure between $30 million and $40 million; about half of what the Rangers spent this year.

The NHLPA would agree to a structure similar to baseball. The association would agree to a luxury tax and revenue sharing. That sets a limit on how much a team can spend on salary, but allows a team to exceed that limit if it’s willing to pay a penalty, a sum that would be spread out to the have nots.

“The players won’t agree to a hard cap,” one influential agent told me this week. “Not this year, not next year, not ever.”

The owners are insistent on a hard cap. Why? Because they don’t trust each other or themselves.

So, if you’re trusting the two sides to smarten up and save the sport, remember this: if you can’t trust yourself, you can’t be trusted to do the right thing. And that, my friends, is why it might be a long, hard winter for NHL fans.

Tom Caron is a studio host for Bruins telecasts on NESN.