NEW YORK – It was theater, a tragicomedy, at a Times Square hotel a block off Broadway. First on stage was Don Fehr, with the players behind him like a chorus line. As the executive director of the NHL Players' Association told the audience how the union had given the NHL a "clear outline" to end the lockout – knowing full well the proposal had not met the owners' explicit conditions – his brother's iPhone rang.

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Steve Fehr, the NHLPA's special counsel, tried to answer but had to let it go to voicemail. He checked it after the uplifting press conference, as the players gave hopeful interviews to reporters, and heard the news: the owners not only had rejected the players' proposal, but had pulled key lements of their own proposal off the table.Surprised?"No comment," Steve Fehr said.

Disappointed?

"Obviously, you'd like to make a deal," he said with a laugh. "But this is a very up-and-down process."

Very.

The players were hushed and herded back on stage in silence. Steve Fehr checked his phone and whispered something into the ear of Winnipeg Jets defenseman Ron Hainsey. Then Don Fehr reemerged and informed the audience that "it looks like this is not going to be resolved in the near future," even though "we are clearly very close, if not on top of one another."

For the finale, it was NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and deputy commissioner Bill Daly, blaming Fehr for "spinning us all into an emotional frenzy that maybe we're close and we're going to be playing hockey tomorrow" – deflecting attention from the fact the owners were driving the sides farther apart.

"Actually, it's not the first time he's said we're close when we weren't," Bettman said. "I don't know why he did that, especially when he knew the parameters that had been laid out last night and what had evolved over the week. I find it almost incomprehensible that he did that."

"We went in great detail as to how they didn't meet those parameters, and we both said, 'We don't know where we go from here. We don't have any ideas with respect to next steps,' " Daly said. "They knew there was a major gulf between us, and yet they came down here and told you that we're close and we could have a deal."

We can only hope that this (bleep) show was for show, that it was all part of a brutal negotiation full of slick strategy and stupid stunts.

We don't know if Bettman is bluffing or really means it this time, whether this will get the union to crack and the players to turn on Fehr, the way they turned on his predecessors. We don't know if Fehr is being brilliant or badly misreading the situation, whether he will get a better deal for the players or make this worse for them. And we won't know until this ends – possibly after the union dissolves, antitrust cases are filed, another season is wasted and a growing game shrinks.

But we do know this: There was a chance for someone to be a hero this week, for the season to be saved like a damsel in distress, and while some auditioned for the role – like Pittsburgh Penguins’ co-owner Ron Burkle and captain Sidney Crosby – both of the leads were villains again.

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