No wonder SportsCenter has had it’s best ratings of all time this year — people haven’t had to sit through hockey highlights.

Rumor has it there isn’t going to be a season this year, and the lockout quite possibly will last into next year.

NHL players and owners better wake up, because their pathetic league is dying and turning into the laughing stock of the sports world.

If you have no clue what’s been going on, here’s a little rundown to catch you up.

A collective bargaining agreement is a deal between the owners and the players of the NHL that sets the rights of the players and teams of the NHL. The previous collective bargaining agreement expired Sept. 15, 2004.

What’s going on is a lockout, not a players’ strike. The owners have locked the players out until a new agreement is reached.

The owners are upset at how high the players’ salaries have gotten, even though they have nobody to blame but themselves. The players obviously want to keep their high salaries, so they are at a standstill.

Last year, the NHL lost approximately $300 million. That’s a lot of money for the supposed fourth-biggest sport in America to be losing in one season.

My big question to the NHL is: Do you actually think you can afford to miss a season?

Hockey has always been thought of as the fourth-biggest sport in America behind baseball, football and basketball. Welcome NASCAR to the Big Four.

It’s not the sport of hockey that turns people off, though. When hockey is pure, it is a great sport. Right now, the NHL is about as popular in America as the Department of Public Safety is at Iowa State. If, for some reason, the NHL would play games this season or next, I hope there will be a major boycott by the few fans the NHL has.

When baseball went on strike in 1994, it took years to rebuild the fan base it had before the strike. The difference between Major League Baseball and hockey is that people actually went to baseball games. You didn’t see baseball losing $300 million a year.

There isn’t one side in this ordeal you can point a finger at. Everyone is greedy. The players are greedy in the sense that in five years their salaries have more than doubled. The owners are greedy in the sense that they will do anything to win, even if they know it’s killing the sport. They run up the players’ salaries to win a Stanley Cup, then cry about it when they realize they’re $50 million in debt.

What can be done? I’m no expert on hockey, but I can think of at least a few things. One is a problem the NHL shares with the MLB — there needs to be a salary cap. Another solution is the contraction of at least four or five teams in the NHL.

The NHL has a lot of small market teams that are losing a ton of money for the league — get rid of them.

I couldn’t care less if I never see another NHL game on TV. But, unlike myself, there are a lot of hockey fans in this country that deserve to see their favorite sport if they want to. Too bad the players and owners are too selfish to think about the fans at a time like this.