At the risk of getting my car keyed in the hockey capital of Maine, I’d like to join the clown chorus and admit that I didn’t miss the National Hockey League over the last 11 months.

Now hold on a minute. I didn’t miss it, but I did crave it a couple of times. Like during that Saturday snowstorm in mid-February. Then there was that time in May that I came home from the office, flipped on ESPN and saw that they were showing “Battle of the Gridiron Stars” for the 46,000th time and decided I could have really used some Stanley Cup playoffs about then.

I’m willing to bet that there are a lot more people like me than the true blue puckheads who died a little every day during the lockout. Ironically, though, I think it will be easier for the league to bring them back from the dead than get the casual fans like me to care about the NHL again.

With a few common sense moves, I think the league can have its diehard fans back in no time. Lower ticket prices, make some rule changes to open up the ice a little bit (but don’t turn it into a shooting gallery, either) and treat them like the loyal customers they are, and they’ll eventually start flocking to the the arenas again.

I’m not suggesting puckheads are lemmings. They’re legitimately angry over what has happened over the last year, and they’ll probably show it by staying away in droves when next season begins.

But hockey is a way of life to them. Going to a Bruins game or a Rangers game or Leafs game or Kings game is more than just an outing, it’s an event, something that I doubt many of them found a substitute for last fall, winter and spring. It’s like if/when football ever has another lockout or strike. At the very least, football fans need an excuse to tailgate. They won’t be able to hold a grudge for very long and neither will hockey fans.

Casual hockey fans certainly don’t have a grudge right now, but since hockey doesn’t mean as much to us, it’s more likely that we found something to fill the small void left in our lives.

We’ll come back when we feel like it, not because we resent the players or the owners, but because a day at the snow tubing park or picking up a classic western at the video store proved to be a pretty good alternative to going to the arena or staying at home and tuning in the game.

Making the price and rules changes noted above will certainly help, but the owners are going to have to do a little more to get us back. They’re on the right track if recent reports of expanding the playoffs to 20 teams are accurate.

I can’t believe I just typed that sentence. I’m normally fervently anti-expansion, whether it’s to the number of teams in the playoffs or number of teams in the league overall. Part of me actually was actually hoping that some of the Sun Belt and West Coast teams would have to fold because of the lockout, and I still think the best thing that could happen to the league is contraction.

But making the playoffs more inclusive would actually be a good thing, at least in the short run. There is nothing in professional sports that matches the night-in, night-out intensity of a seven-game Stanley Cup playoff series. It’s hockey at its best and purest, and the more of that you have, the more you’ll draw in the not-so-ardent fan.

Some argue that adding four teams to the playoffs renders the regular season meaningless. The regular season is too long and meaningless already. Adding a few more playoff games isn’t going to change that, and it is going to create some buzz for playoff hockey in more parts of the country.

Heck, it might even lead to an actual national television contract, which the NHL does not have right now.

Over the last several days, we’ve been inundated with newspaper and television stories analyzing the ins and outs of the league’s new collective bargaining agreement. But who really cares if the players win or the owners win under the new agreement? Who cares whether the salary cap allows the Bruins to be good and yet still be cheap?

The important question is this – Do you like hockey?

If you do, even just a little bit, and if the owners and players have learned anything over the last year, then you’ll probably start watching the NHL again.

Randy Whitehouse is a staff writer. He can be reached [email protected]