Silent night

 Still unsure if the Fort Wayne Komets will be playing hockey tonight, but if they don't it will be an odd feeling indeed. Sort of like showing up to an old friend's annual Christmas party and finding his house dark and all the familiar faces nowhere to be found.

Or  to put it another way: Komet Hockey on strike. Now there's a new one.

The Professional Hockey Players' Association's work stoppage against the ECHL is scheduled to begin today, although as of last night no strike notice had been issued. But the league and its players association are so far apart, and negotiations have so all but stopped, that it seems inevitable.

Komet Hockey on strike. 

The Allen County War Memorial Coliseum dark. All those fans in their orange-and-black throwbacks off somewhere else. Icy banging on his drum and getting nothing back but echoes of echoes.

A silent night, one day after the silent night.

And, look, I'm not going to get into why that's happening, or whether or not what the league has offered is a fair shake and the PHPA is just being pig-headed. All I know is, minor-league hockey is a grind for both owners and players, but it's the players who generally bear the front end of it. The ECHL isn't the Federal League of "Slapshot" fame, but the bus rides through all those bleak winter landscapes -- and everything else about second-tier minor-league hockey -- is real.

And so, as the fictional Private Bucklin of the rebellious 2nd Maine says in the film "Gettysburg," the workforce has grievances. The ECHL has either addressed them (the league's version), or whizzed on the players and told them it's raining (the PHPA's version). 

Me?

I just see the whole business as the world doing what it does -- spinning along as the days and years and decades flutter past -- no matter how much we wish it wouldn't.

We can all long for the days of the Des Moines Oak Leafs and Port Huron Flags and the rest of the dead-and-gone IHL, but they're not coming back and there's nothing for it. The NHL was a half-dozen or dozen teams back then, and there was no true farm system. The same training camp cuts wound up playing ever year for the same teams in the "I", and it all felt as comfortable as an old couch with the hip hollows broken in.

Same favorites wearing the same home sweaters every year. Same villains wearing the same visitors' sweaters. And the only people going on strike were those bleeping-blank baseball players.

Now, of course, hockey is like every other sport, with affiliations and two-way deals and a structured developmental system. Players get called up; players get sent down. Managing a roster has become an art form in itself.

A lot of folks in my advanced age bracket hate this. I tend to see it merely as the inevitability of change. Whether I like it or not (and I don't, particularly) is irrelevant.

All hope for at this point is that the possibility Komets general manager David Franke floated in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette this morning doesn't happen: That the league might consider bringing in replacement players. This was a terrible idea when the NFL did it 38 years ago, even if Hollywood did get a movie out of it ("The Replacements", starring Keanu Reeves as the immortal Shane Falco). It remains a terrible idea -- especially for a league like the ECHL.

This is because, while I'll make no blind assumptions about the demography of the league's fan base, I'm guessing at least a fair percentage of it is composed of union men and women. And union men and women don't generally cotton to scab labor.

(And, yes, I'll use that term, because I grew up working class myself. My people were factory workers and mechanics and farmers and schoolteachers. I get it honest, in other words.)

Anyway, on we go. We're a handful of hours from Friday night, and Komet Hockey most likely will not be on the air. Strange times.

These times, though.