All right, quit crying in your Molson.

The lockout isn’t going to ruin hockey. In fact, it just might save it, provided the owners aren’t too greedy and the players aren’t too stubborn.

The league has been slowly bleeding to death for 10 years. Be as cynical of commissioner Gary Bettman and the owner’s bookkeeping as you like, you’d be naive to think the league wasn’t already teetering on the brink of irrelevancy and sliding down the slippery slope to extinction. Something had to be done, and with the players seemingly unwilling to budge and the owners making unreasonable demands (really, a $31 million salary cap?), everyone, players, owners, fans, vendors, bar owners, is going to have to suffer through what looks like a long 12 months.

For years, the NHL has been striving to expand its appeal beyond Canada, the Northeast and Great Lakes states and entrench itself as the fourth major sport. Unfortunately, the league has been so single-minded in this pursuit and so narrow-minded in its execution that it has turned off more fans than it has turned on. It has also produced the system that we have today where the league has lost nearly $2 billion in the last decade and where the league’s stars are as unrecognizable as they have been in the last 40 years.

The owners and the players are equally to blame for this, and both will get theirs before a settlement is ultimately reached. All of the owners will lose money, some will lose their franchise. The players will lose jobs and money and a year off their career.

NHL fans have a lot to lose, too, which is unfortunate since most of them don’t really care whether the game became as big as football, baseball and basketball. They recognize that there are many unwanted trappings to being so popular — athletes with bloated salaries and egos, needless pregame and halftime entertainment extravaganzas, playoff starting times pushed back to 9 p.m. to draw the maximum primetime audience. Just give them a competitive league with solid two-way hockey. affordable ticket prices when they go to a game, decent television coverage when they don’t and the occasional clean fight and they’re happy.

Hockey fans are a tough crowd to alienate, and yet the NHL has taken numerous steps to do just that in recent years. Rising payrolls and disappearing TV revenues have driven ticket prices beyond what many fans can or will pay. All of the clutching, grabbing and trapping has turned the ice into a quagmire and the skating, passing and creativity that drew many to the sport from Orr’s prime to Gretzky’s heyday has gone the way of Peter Puck. And the expansion that was supposed to broaden hockey’s horizons has stretched the talent so thin that the fans in those new markets have been quick to realize that they’re stuck with an inferior product.

The lockout won’t solve all of these problems, but it will go a long way toward addressing them, provided that above all else, the league goes into this with two goals in mind – 1) lower ticket prices and 2) a better product. Anything else will be pointless in the long run.

A prolonged work-stoppage will probably force some franchises to fold. No Atlanta Thrashers, no Florida Panthers, no Nashville Predators, no big loss. The only time anybody south of the Mason-Dixon line even knows hockey exists is between the end of bowl season and the week before the Daytona 500.

Now, what about the real hockey fans? Will they be able to forgive and forget when play resumes?

The league will earn their forgiveness by replenishing the talent pool and implementing some fundamental changes, like opening the ice up. They’ll make them forget by lowering ticket prices.

It’s unfortunate that the closest the NHL has come to matching the three major sports is in the mistreatment of its fans. But the fans can see the bigger picture. Earlier this week, a Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, surveyed its readers on the lockout, and nearly two-thirds said they thought the NHL will ultimately become a better league once it ends.

The fans are willing to ride this one out, provided the owners don’t chicken out and put another band aid over the situation again like they did with the last lockout a decade ago.

With some selective amputation and a blood transfusion, the puckheads will be knocking out each other’s teeth to get back to the arena.