It's Saturday night and you're not watching your professional sport, hockey fans.
Instead, you're watching the Cougars or the Spruce Kings. On TV, Canucks fans can swallow their pride and cheer for either the Abbotsford Heat, the farm team for the Calgary Flames, or the Chicago Wolves, Vancouver's top farm team.
Or there are fabulous Major League Baseball playoffs and some excellent football on both sides of the border. You'll be able to throw in some NBA basketball soon and there's always NASCAR.
If you are paying attention to the ongoing soap opera that is the NHL lockout, you are witnessing the epitome of bad behaviour - well-dressed young millionaires arguing with older well-dressed millionaires and billionaires about money.
Not only is there no chance of a full season of NHL hockey this year, there are an increasing number of hockey watchers betting that, for the second time in eight years, the entire season will be cancelled and the Stanley Cup will not be awarded next June.
This is the fourth time in 20 years hockey fans have put up with this nonsense, following the short season after the 1992 strike and the even shorter season after the 1994-95 lockout.
Unbelievably, the owners and the players killed the entire 2004-2005 season, yet here they are, threatening to do it again.
And you know whose fault it is?
Look in the mirror, loyal hockey fan.
When league commissioner Gary Bettman and player union boss Donald Fehr talk about a 50-50 split in revenues, they're not talking about the money of the owners or the money of the players.
No, they're talking about your money.
You are the source of their future revenues.
When they talk about revenues continuing to grow annually by five to seven per cent, they are talking about you spending more money and time following NHL hockey and then coercing your friends to do the same.
And both the players and the unions believe they deserve a bigger share of your money.
And they're not afraid of you withholding your money from them in the future.
After all, they gassed an entire season on you just eight years ago and how did you show your displeasure? By flocking back to the game en masse like desperate junkies, throwing your money at them in glee.
They know you'll come back again, too.
Hockey fans, you need to teach the players and owners a lesson they'll never forget about spending your money before you give it to them. Here's how:
In the summer of 1994, Major League Baseball players went on strike in the middle of the season. There was no World Series that year for the first time in 90 years and the players and owners didn't settle their differences until the following April.
Baseball fans showed the players and the owners who's really in charge when play resumed for the 1995 season. Fan attendance was down an average of 20 per cent across the entire league.
And it didn't get better in 1996.
Or 1997.
Only in 1998, thanks to the drug-fuelled assaults on Roger Maris's home run record by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, did baseball get its mojo back.
Baseball got the message, too. Number of Major League Baseball labour disruptions since 1994: zero. none. nada.
See where I'm going with this, hockey fans?
When NHL hockey returns, whether it's later this year, next spring or next fall, turn your back on the game you love.
Keep your money in your pocket.
Don't go to the games, don't watch them on TV and don't buy merchandise.
When they beg you to come back, stay strong and ask them what 50-50 of zero is.
And don't protest for just a month. Do it for two years. Divorce yourself of professional hockey right now, cold turkey, until 2014 or 2015.
You'll come back to lower ticket prices, lower merchandise prices and players and owners that understand that without you, the fans, they're nothing.
