As it happens, I was in midtown Manhattan last Friday, doing a lengthy taping for the new Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War as the National Hockey League prepared to bring down the curtain.

I wasn’t in New York to cover the birth of yet another lockout — which is just as well, because there was precious little to cover. Gary Bettman was determined to shut down the league no matter what happened and little was being said by the commissioner, Donald Fehr or the principals on either side. And it wasn’t drawing much coverage: with the baseball pennant races in full swing, the National Football League back in action and a big weekend of NCAA football ahead, the New York papers were treating the pending NHL lockout as an afterthought.

But from the useful perspective of New York City, there was no escaping the truth: hockey’s heart is still in Canada, but its head is in New York. The locus of the game has shifted, irrevocably. It’s not simply that league headquarters moved from Montreal to New York in 1989; the move occurred under the reign of the ineffective, bumbling John Ziegler — but when the energetic, control freak Bettman took over, all the power shifted south of the border.

That’s where it is. That’s where it will remain, which is why Canadian fans have only one recourse if they want to regain some tiny voice in the way our game is run: Stay away.

During the last lockout, I heard from at least a thousand fans who swore they would never return to the NHL in any way, shape or form. Then the lockout was settled and we couldn’t stampede back fast enough. Before the lockout, even the Canadiens did not sell out every game. Since the lockout, they can charge regular-season prices for exhibition games and still draw 21,273 night after night — and the story is the same across Canada.

As Bettman, operating from his base of power in New York, plunged the league into yet another lockout this weekend, he was counting on one thing: the passion of Canadians when it comes to hockey. The passion — and the stupidity.

It’s up to us to prove him wrong. Because there is no reason for this lockout, none whatsoever. Bettman is throwing a lockout because he can, it’s that simple. It’s happening because of the bully-boy tactics of Bettman himself, backed by a coterie of ideology-driven right-wing U.S. billionaires who are in this not because they love the game, but because they love money and attention.

This lockout is wholly unnecessary. It’s also maddening, frustrating, disgusting, absurd and infuriating. What is hardest to swallow, up here where the game really matters, is that Canadians have so little say in what’s going on.

Even as we celebrate (if that’s the word) the great victory over the Soviets in the Summit Series of ’72, you have to wonder if we weren’t facing off with the wrong enemy. The NHL and the game (and in the minds of many Canadians, they’re one and the same) have been damaged far more by the U.S. than by the Soviets or the Russians.

The harm is coming, not from U.S. players or fans, but from the U.S. owners and their pit-bull proxy, Bettman, a little man with a huge ego who would rather destroy the league than lose.

In retrospect, the headlong expansion into the U.S. did more than water down the game and weigh down the league with a half-dozen shaky franchises in cities where the NHL does not belong: it also guaranteed that the balance of power would shift, permanently and irrevocably, to the United States.

Last week, former Gazette baseball writer Sean Gordon wrote an article for one of our national newspapers exposing the union-busting ideology of some of the billionaire Americans behind the current shutdown, including the Flyers regrettable Ed Snyder and Jeremy Jacobs of the Bruins, chairman of the NHL Board of Governors, Bettman confidante and (despite his long-time Democratic connections) as anti-union as they come.

Gordon’s article was a reminder than against this array of U.S. billionaires, a civic-minded owner like Geoff Molson (a Canadian who is steeped in hockey tradition as a player, fan and descendant of generations of hockey Molsons) has little or no power. We can’t know what Molson really thinks, because Bettman’s gag order on the owners penalizes anyone who sends a smoke signal to the press with death by strangulation — but from everything we know of Molson, he figures to be one of the more conciliatory owners.

Which means he might as well whistle into the wind. As Bettman built the airtight coalition of owners that backs his every move, he made sure to rewrite the NHL bylaws so that, in truth, he needs the backing of only a handful to perpetuate this lockout through two full seasons and beyond. Given that there is a clique of owners who would rather leave the league a smoking ruin than to give in to the players, it may take massive concessions from the players for this to be solved anytime soon.

The only hope rests with television — with U.S. television contracts and the events scheduled between Black Friday in the U.S. (which falls on Nov. 30 this year) and the Winter Classic game that pits the Detroit Red Wings against the Toronto Maple Leafs before a potential crowd of 115,000 at the Big House in Ann Arbor on Jan. 1. The Black Friday games are a significant ratings draw and the HBO series 24/7 and the Winter Classic are the strongest marketing tools the NHL has ever possessed.

The players will take the first hit in the lockout, when regular-season games (and regular-season paycheques) are cancelled beginning Oct. 11. The owners will take the second (and perhaps the more significant) hit if they miss the games between Nov. 30 and New Year’s Day.

Because the underlying philosophical issues have been settled (the NHL and the NHLPA aren’t quarrelling over a salary cap or what constitutes hockey-related revenue) this comes down to only one issue: how the league and the players split the money that is pouring in. It requires no more than the movement of a few percentage points, which is why this lockout is so unnecessary and so wrong.

Meanwhile, helpless Canadians can only look on, wring our hands helplessly, and wonder how it is that our game was hijacked by these people. But if you don’t like it, don’t complain to me. Don’t leave comments on the idiot boards. Don’t yell at your wife or kick the dog.

Just don’t go back. Doesn’t matter whether you think the owners or the players are to blame, your response should be the same: don’t go back. Bettman is counting on “our great fans” (meaning “our great suckers”) to underwrite this by paying even more inflated ticket prices after the lockout. Prove him wrong: stay away.

What you say now doesn’t matter. It’s what you do after the lockout that matters. Don’t buy NHL merchandise, don’t buy tickets, don’t watch on television. You don’t have to do it forever — just stay away for a year or two. Make sure the NHL takes a significant financial hit for the sins of Bettman.

It’s either that, or stand by and watch this guy shut down the league whenever he pleases, from now until forever.

jacktodd46@yahoo.com