Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

We all knew that the NHL's return from the lockout was met not with the icy disinterest and empty buildings – that romantics envisioned as payback against the owners for robbing fans of the game they loved – but rather overwhelming enthusiasm.

Since coming back in mid-January, the league has enjoyed sellouts across the continent, sky-high ratings, and so on and so on and so on. What very few probably saw coming was just how eager fans would be to not only see the NHL return, but to fork over their money to its greedy, cynical owners. Larry Brooks reported yesterday that the NHLPA learned the League was projecting it would walk away with $2.4 billion in hockey-related revenues for this abbreviated season. You'll note that's down only $900 million or so from the $3.3 billion it generated in an 82-game season, complete with a Winter Classic and an All-Star Game.

As Brooks points out, that's 72.7 percent of revenues enjoyed in a full season from just 58.5 percent of the games, without the league's usual days-long cash-cow events. And it only serves to underscore the owners' belief that hockey fans are gullible money machines who will make willy-nilly purchases of tickets, merchandise, concessions and more like a teenager at the mall with mommy and daddy's credit card.

I didn't think it was so long ago that the Canadian media was running polls showing definitively that well over half of all NHL fans swore up and down that they would never give another cent to their favorite teams no matter how much it killed them. So what gives?

First of all it must be said that everyone on the planet, except maybe the people giving those answers, knew that those polls were garbage. Things said in anger shouldn't be taken as gospel, and hockey fans were certainly angry during the lockout. They had every right to be. But still, anyone who put the slightest credence in those numbers likely works as a player agent.

Maybe Brooks is right that fans just care more about there being 48 games instead of 82 because every one of them counts more. Maybe there's just been more engaging hockey drawing fans back in after that initial surge of "we're just so happy it's back" interest. Maybe it's even a function of the shortened season and intra-conference schedules keeping more teams seemingly in striking distance of a playoff spot instead of fading so quickly (to wit: the Flames and Islanders entered Sunday five points back of playoff spots despite being 14th and 13th in their respective conferences). But people keep showing up regardless of the reason, and that in turn gives the owners plenty of ammunition when they get the chance to opt out of the brand-new CBA in just seven and a half years' time.

All the big percentages of those polls with fans pledging disinterest might have been shocking, but they were nothing compared with what owners are reaping now. It seems that absence did indeed make fans' hearts grow fonder, and now owners know that all those seat-fillers will come crawling back the second there are seats to fill, truly and definitively.

One common cry during the lockout was how dumb the NHL must have been to go through it all again so soon after the last one. What about labor peace? What about rationality? Turns out that labor peace has little to no impact on the bottom line, and if anything might actually serve as something of a detriment. Rationality, as with the arduous 113-day process itself, likewise plays little to no role in the post-lockout world either.

No one expected the fans to stay away forever, or probably even for a short time, but now owners know they will never be afraid. If there was no backlash after this, why on earth would there be one in 2020?

The NHL repeatedly said throughout the lockout that the growth seen after the 2004-05 season was canceled — of between 5 and 7 percent per year — was unsustainable going forward. Just another lie fed to fans during the lockout. This latest projection shows that's probably not the case, not now and probably not for next season at the very least. Those numbers will likely continue to come as hockey grows more popular even in the face of these malevolent ownership groups having done all in their power to make you really not like them.