If the NHL doesn’t send its players to the Olympics in 2014, it won’t strictly be due to those annoying things some revved-up fans want to overlook. For instance, the eight-hour time difference that eliminates prime-time games anywhere in North America, or the chance of a shooting war a couple of hundred kilometres away, or conflict between the NHL and the KHL, the Russian pro league.

Plenty of devotees in this part of the world, still coasting on the fumes of that gold-medal game from six months ago, “want’’ the pros there, of course. (Many of them “want’’ another NHL team in this part of the world, too. How’s that working out? Any fewer tickets being sold in Canada because of it? Of course not. You can’t always get what you want, particularly when what you want will cost someone else money.)

If and when Gary Bettman and his boys pull the plug on NHLers as Olympians — and the guess here is that he and they will — the main factor will be easy to identify: Going to Russia is simply bad business for a league that needs all the good business it can get.

Does anyone really think all those owners, particularly those in the U.S., want their buildings sitting empty for two or three weeks in the meat of the season? No other big-time team sport shuts down for the Olympics. Why should they?

What’s in it for the owners, particularly in the land that can’t possibly care like Canada does? NBC didn’t even show the games in prime time at the past Olympics — and at least there was a chance to do it from Vancouver. Not so in Sochi, where the clocks will never line up properly.

NHL owners have several legitimate questions raised by the compacted season, travel difficulties and the imbalance of competition, given that some teams send almost nobody and rest up, while some send 10 players who arrive home depleted to varying degree after the Games. With playoff spots going down to the wire, who wants to lose a point here or there because of Olympic hangover?

Plus, the International Olympic Committee, the dears, own the show along with the IIHF. Meaning the NHL can’t do business the way the NBA does, thanks to its relationship with USA Basketball. The NHL, which can’t even get access to the highlights for its own website much less market them, has no similar sport-building relationship with Hockey Canada.

The other big issue, if you’re an NHL owner, could involve insurance or lack thereof. Owners take all the risk. As it stands, if someone’s superstar blows out an ACL for his mother country then later turns into Jonas Hoglund, the owner is on the hook for the entire contract. Who wants to chance that?

John Furlong, the mahatma of Vancouver, told that hockey palaver in Toronto this week that “the fans would never forgive you’’ if the no-NHL situation returned to the way it was up to 1994. That sounds quaint, but what exactly would they do? Stop buying Leafs, Canadiens or Canucks tickets or turn off the TV? Won’t happen.

The easiest solution is to take the world junior tournament, which nobody except Canada goes wild for, and make it the Olympic hockey competition every four years. It’s still good hockey, still the best of its class and still worth watching (as Canadians prove every Boxing Day). Plus, the gold medal still would be the gold medal, the one many Canadians got awfully upset at not winning for 50 years before 2002.

In the bigger picture, too, we’d always have Vancouver, glowing forever as the national hockey beacon. Sochi could never top it, anyway.

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