“I think we are at a stage where the issues have been joined, there has been a tremendous amount of discussion, it’s time for us really to dig, to dig deep, and try to find solutions and try to be creative and try to compromise in a way that will work for everybody,” Pash said Friday. “It’s a challenge, we’ve got very serious issues, we’ve got significant differences. But we are committed to collective bargaining. All over this country, collective bargaining is being challenged. We’re committed to it. We believe it can work.”

The extension allows negotiators to step back from the precipice on which they have been perched for days. During Thursday’s talks it became clear, said one person who was in the negotiating room, that neither side had a thirst to use the weapons it had amassed for an all-out labor fight  the union dissolving itself, and a lockout by the owners  and that both sides now viewed March as a serious deadline.

The threat of the process known as decertification by the players, combined with the owners’ desire to avoid the Minneapolis courtroom of the federal judge David S. Doty, played into the owners’ move to try to work out a deal now, before a work stoppage.

Doty has consistently ruled in the players’ favor during his years of overseeing the collective bargaining agreement, most recently this week, when he determined that the owners had violated terms of the agreement by negotiating television contracts that gave them guaranteed money even during a lockout in exchange for what might have been lesser money collected. His ruling not only put into jeopardy the $4 billion in revenue the owners thought they’d have access to during a lockout, but it also raised the possibility that he could award damages.

That decision, although it was expected by owners, and the prospect that Doty would preside over antitrust lawsuits filed by players in the event of decertification, sent a chill through owners. They are likely to make Doty’s removal from oversight of the collective bargaining agreement part of the talks next week.

The threat of Doty has not disappeared with the extension. With the deadline pushed back, the union has until 5 p.m. Eastern next Friday to file decertification papers with Doty’s court. That, though, would happen only if there were not a deal or another extension. While the football world anxiously waits for an outcome, Cohen made the point that the N.F.L. has been involved in mediated talks just 11 days, a short period by his standards. He could press the sides to accept another extension next week if a deal is not reached by then.