The National Hockey League skulks back into action this weekend, after a four-month lockout. Some fans are boycotting the game, in retaliation for the childish, self-destructive negotiating tactics that deprived them of the season’s first half. Others are merely thrilled to have hockey back; winter nights are awfully dark without the sight of all those colors swirling around the flat screen, and without the nightly opera of the so-called game within the game—the sub-plots of grievance and payback, misconduct and reprimand—to say nothing of the exhibition of idiosyncratic skill. I’m trying to be one of the in-betweens: I’ll watch, but warily and with lingering bitterness. Returning to the game feels a little like showing up at breakfast the morning after a family argument: I’m not ready to look hockey in the eye. I’m not saying a word until hockey does.

Sure, a lockout may have been necessary. After last season, the collective-bargaining agreement between the owners and the Players’ Association—an agreement that had arisen out of another lockout, eight years earlier—expired. The owners wanted a better deal for themselves. The old one had structural flaws (such as rules on salary-cap accounting that allowed Enron-caliber manipulation of long-term contracts), and the players were getting a larger share of total revenues than their counterparts in football, baseball, or basketball. But in order to obtain that better deal, the owners—facing players who were reluctant to give anything up—opened with an arrogant and antagonistic negotiating strategy that quickly poisoned the well, and turned what could have been a relatively small and easily bridged difference in numbers and philosophy into a pouty Verdun. This suited the sour command of their chief executive, the league commissioner, Gary Bettman, who has now presided over three debilitating lockouts and thousands of cancelled games. This time, he got his bosses a pretty good deal. That’s why they pay him eight million dollars a year—and also why everyone who doesn’t own a hockey team dislikes him even more than they did before.

Bettman’s antagonist, the Players’ Association representative Donald Fehr, helped maneuver the players out of a total screw-job, but his determination also prolonged the battle and nearly cost the players their livelihood. He’s not a hockey guy (he used to lead baseball’s players’ union), but he played the lockout game with the menacing unflappability of a prairie defenseman, and the occasional skunk tactics of an agitator like Eddie Shack. And he sure got under Bettman’s skin. A fan dreams of an All-Star game with Bettman and Fehr playing goal at either end, in suits, with briefcases for blockers and Blackberries for masks. Shoot high, boys.

But that was last night. The coffee’s kicking in. These waffles are good. Reports from the teams’ Cliff’s-Notes training camps have quickened the curiosity. Stars have flown in from a diaspora of lesser leagues in Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and even England, or else from hometown rec leagues and gyms. Rick Nash (Rangers), Claude Giroux (Flyers), Ilya Kovalchuk (Devils), Sidney Crosby (Penguins)—the thought of seeing such stars light it up, or even of seeing their names clutter the box scores, puts a little shine in a winter’s day. There’s a big slate of games this weekend—hard even for the most determined boycotter to shun. The refusenik’s notion that the occasional college hockey game on TV, announced by our own Doc Emrick (who during the lockout even called a twelve-and-under girls game in Minnesota, to keep the pipes tuned and the thesaurus warm), might be enough to sustain a fan into spring crumbles amid anticipation of today’s Penguins-Flyers opener, the resumption of a feud that makes Bettman-Fehr look like a game of pick-up sticks. There will be rust. Blood, too, maybe. But once Crosby and Giroux start chirping, the ice will break, hard hearts will melt, and hockey and I will be on speaking terms again.

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn.