The Games That Weren't may seem surreal, but too so does the lockout for hockey diehards—many of whom, like Rasmussen, are finding novel ways to cope. For these fans, this November is tough to take. It's not just that games aren't being played: This early in an NHL season, the games usually don't really matter. It's that the emotional thrill of hockey's return isn't there. So fans have to get it from somewhere else.

In Washington, Russian Machine Never Breaks has been the irreverent yet authoritative voice of Capitals' fandom, reveling in the sublime exploits of Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom, or—when the occasion calls for it, which is fairly often—talking Caps faithful off a ledge. If this were a normal season, site editor Ian Oland and his co-bloggers would be publishing game recaps and interviews, or attempting to blanket the Verizon Center with "game on" signs. Instead, after choosing not to focus on the intricacies of the labor dispute, RMNB has trained its attention on more distant rinks.

RMNB might be the only NHL fan site with a Moscow bureau—fortuitous in times like these. Russia-based blogger Fedor Fedin has kept close watch on Capitals prospects playing in the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), translating news reports and interviews and giving Washington fans a sense of what the future might hold. This season, he's given Oland something of a KHL crash-course. The ice is Olympic-sized—much larger than the rinks used in the NHL. "Speed is very, very important in the KHL," he says. "There's a lot more open space ... it's much less physical."

And there are other idiosyncrasies too. "Fedor showed me that the goalie will come out for one of the teams and shovel coal into the net—for the team that has like, a coal thing in their name." (He's referring to HC Donbass, who play in Ukrainian coal country.) Oland says that in the Swedish league, Caps speedster Brooks Laich is his team's leading scorer, a distinction that entitles him to a special jersey and helmet with flames on the side.

"We really want to show our readers how it's going for Laich, how it's going for Ovi, how it's going for [Capitals prospect Evgeny Kuznetsov] so they can still feel like there's hockey, even if there isn't," Oland says.

Yet with the NHL sidelined, foreign hockey has a teasing quality to it. Fans in Minsk or Astana or Niznekamsk are treated to thrilling, near-NHL-level hockey, while in Pittsburgh, those autumn weeknights are chillingly empty.

"Having a game a couple times a week for a couple hours—you can kind of lose yourself in that and have a kind of release from normal life," says Derek Rocco, editor of the PensBlog. He estimates that he tweets up to 200 times during a typical Penguins game, swapping observations and jokes with a close community of fans. I spoke with him just hours after it was reported that the league was on the brink of canceling its annual Winter Classic, which is no longer scheduled to be played in front of over 100,000 fans at Michigan Stadium on New Year's Day. He said he was resigned to the season being axed, even if the possibility still feels a little unreal. "We're at the point where the game is as good as it's been," Rocco says. "The level of play is as good as it's been. There are big names, great storylines, it's just fantastic. Now they're just throwing that all away, and it's unbelievable that it's even happening."