Maybe it was an omen. The NFL and NFL Players Association announced an agreement last Monday that bolsters support for health, safety and wellness for players, striking a collaborative tone that can hardly be taken for granted when considering the history of discord between the sides.

If only they can strike the next labor deal with such harmony.

We’ll see.

Two years remain on the marathon 10-year collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players. Apparently, they are nowhere near striking an extension – or signaling that another work stoppage is on the horizon.

Hey, it’s early. At least they’re talking.

"We’ve got a long way to go,” John Mara, the New York Giants co-owner who chairs the NFL’s primary labor negotiating committee, told USA TODAY Sports during the league meetings in Miami last week. “There’s a willingness on both sides to have continued conversation.”

Mara said the last meeting occurred in New York two weeks ago and that he remains optimistic that they will be able to avoid the type of twists that came with the last deal: owners pulled the trigger on the longest lockout in league history, players decertified as a union and the courtroom became a riveting battleground with marquee man Tom Brady one of the named plaintiffs in a suit against the NFL.

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After all, there’s no need to kill the golden goose that is NFL cash flow.

Yet optimism often gives way to venom when the division of dollars is at stake for a league that likely generates more than $15 billion per year in revenues.

Although NFLPA officials declined to comment, it is expected that union chief DeMaurice Smith, heading labor talks for the second time during his reign, will strike a more aggressive stance than in 2011 – when a perception persisted that the players took it on the chin after owners dug in to take back what was lost from the previous deal.

In the 2011 deal, players received between 47-48½ percent of all revenues and the NFLPA won a key restructuring of workplace rules that, to the chagrin of coaches, lessened physical demands. But the economics seemingly so favored the owners that they didn’t even want an opt-out clause like they had in the previous CBA that was powered through by Smith’s predecessor, the late Gene Upshaw.

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Issues for the next deal?

Surely, there will be more discussion about whether NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has too much power when it comes to player discipline. There could be movement toward getting marijuana removed from the list of banned substances in the drug policy, which might flow from the pending joint committee that will be charged to explore alternative pain-management measures. Maybe the protest debate – which the NFLPA essentially squashed last year after owners tried to ram through a national anthem policy – will be revived with a desire for an NBA-like standard requiring players to stand.

Also, in advancing the health and safety initiatives pushed by the competition committee – such as outlawing the “Oklahoma Drill” and other risky tactics in practices – it is apparent that the notion of revising the NFL calendar to allow for more time at the start of training camp before contact drills begin will ultimately be a CBA matter.

Yet all of those are essentially side issues. It will still come down to money, like always.

Mara, echoing other NFL owners, maintains that the current economic system – with a salary cap and rookie wage scale – works.

"That’s still the framework,” Mara said.

Yet within the big picture of what overall share of revenues goes to players, it will be interesting to see how far the union will push for guaranteed salaries. Now that would shake up the framework.

Maybe that’s the one factor players – and there are fewer than 200, league-wide, who were in the NFL during the lockout in 2011 -- can rally around, given the increasingly shorter career spans for the rank-and-file and the physical sacrifices inherent in their brutal occupation.

Then again, with one owner maintaining that the 300 highest-paid players in the NFL earn 63% of the salary cap dollars in the league, it will take some serious solidarity for players to take a stand revolving around the type of guaranteed contracts that are common in Major League Baseball and in the NBA.

In the last round of NFL labor talks, guaranteed contracts was pretty much a deal-breaker from the owners' perspective. Next time?

The union has told agents to prepare clients for the possibility of a work stoppage. That’s rather standard, yet it is also a sign of this era that a significant slice of the rank-and-file has turned over since the last time. And maybe as many as a third of the players who will be in the league when the current CBA expires after the 2020 season are in college now. Educating the players on labor issues is a constant.

"The union always encourages us to have the players save for a lockout,” longtime agent Peter Schaffer told USA TODAY. “We always do that. We believe a lockout can come at any time, because they can always get cut.”

That would underscore the desire for guaranteed contracts. Schaffer insists that the communication and spirit between NFLPA leadership and the agent community has improved after being fractured, by some accounts, after the last labor deal. Whether that significantly fuels the solidarity needed to make a strong negotiating stand remains to be seen.

In the meantime, NFL 100 beckons with the coming season promising to pay homage to the rich history and traditions of the nation’s most popular sport.

Then NFL 101 looms, and perhaps it will be complete with a traditional labor battle.