It’s millionaires vs. billionaires time again. Guess whose side the fans are on.

The National Hockey League lockout and subsequent nixing of the 2004-05 season has produced a curious phenomenon that arises any time there is a work stoppage in professional sports. The overwhelming majority of fans are blaming the players for the mess that could ultimately lead to the demise of the league.

Fans have been through so many of these strikes and lockouts over the last 25 years that it’s become a knee-jerk reaction to blame the players, regardless of the sport or the circumstances surrounding the shutdown.

All you need to do is listen carefully to the language fans use when they discuss the work stoppage. How many people have you heard refer to the current NHL impasse call as a strike instead of a lockout?

It’s an understandable reaction. When fans think of players unions, what pops into their minds is Donald Fehr and Gene Orza, glowering for the cameras as they describe the plight of their wealthy constituency. They think of greedy, arrogant union leadership whose mission it is to get every last penny they can out of the owners, baseball and the fans be damned.

They think of players holding out for more money in the middle of their contracts and going to the highest bidder when they’re free agents. They think of players demanding dramatic salary increases at every turn, then crying collusion when owners finally wake up an realize it’s time to show some fiscal discipline. They think of the union resisting steroid testing, until Congressional and public pressure made it a necessity, because cracking down on performance enhancing drugs might cost the players a few home runs and ultimately a few million dollars.

It’s enough to make Norma Rae anti-union, never mind the guy who shells out $300 to take his family to a game. So it’s only natural for the hockey fan, having seen player salaries and ticket prices skyrocket in recent years while the quality of the game plummets, to point the finger at every Yuri, Jerome and Jaromir.

This time, though, the owners are the bad guys. They’re the reason the product has been watered down through over-expansion. It’s their fault tickets have become unaffordable while TV revenue has vanished. The game has dissolved into a congestive clutch-and-grab snoozefest while they’ve dragged their feet on obvious rule changes that would open up the game. They’re the reason the sport’s mediocre players are overpaid while its truly great players are virtual unknowns to the average American sports fan.

And they’re the reason the cancellation of the 2004-05 season is going to do irreparable damage. They wanted this to happen. Commissioner Gary Bettman said it himself – the owners stood to lose less money by not playing the season than playing it under the current system.

But it’s become clear that the owners are in this for more than fiscal changes. Even though the players agreed to roll back nearly a quarter of their current salaries, then agreed to a $49 million salary cap, even as it appeared progress was being made in the negotiations, Bettman couldn’t wait to announce the cancellation of the season.

If he hadn’t been so eager, perhaps the last-ditch efforts this past weekend would have continued until an agreement was reached. It still might have been too late to play this season, but at least those hockey fans willing to forgive and forget would go into the spring and summer knowing hockey was only six more months away.

Yet it’s the players who will hear the booing and bear the brunt of the public backlash if and when they ever play again.

What it basically comes down to is who the fans are more jealous of, the players or the owners. It’s the players, of course, because that’s who we all identify with first.

Fans tend to think that because they identify with the players, they can be the players. They superimpose their values, work ethic and upbringing on athletes who have been leading completely different lives than them, even long before they became millionaires.

Come on, we all know that if we’d spent our childhood waking up at 4 a.m. for practice, if we’d sacrificed our social lives to spend hundreds of hours in blood and sweat to get better, then left home at 16 to play junior hockey, then as adults had to give up our privacy and time with our families just to play hockey, we’d all do it for free, right?

Well, maybe not for free, but we’d all turn down the first owner who offered us a seven-figure contract, wouldn’t we? Then we’d offer to give him 25 percent of our salary back when his screw-ups started hitting him in the wallet, of course.

It’s not time for us to feel sorry for hockey players, but we at least owe them a reasonable examination of the circumstances surrounding their predicament before we put them in the penalty box.