Now the lawyers are going to pick over the carcass of what’s left of the game. Proskauer Rose, the lockout lawyers, are running this sad little circus — but at the end of the day, the lawyers are the only ones with anything to gain.

Gary Bettman appears ready to bring the league down around his ears rather than make a deal, so let the lawyers have it. There are more important things in life, like your kids. Kids who should not be at risk but are — because of gun laws that are too stupid for words.

So give the kids an extra hug, spoil the dickens out of them at Christmas — and let the kids have the game back. They love it most and best, whether they’re playing it on a frozen pond or dreaming their Sidney Crosby dreams. And in Winnipeg and Montreal, Moose Jaw and Moncton, we’ll find something better to do with our Saturday nights.

Hockey will live on, from the KHL to the World Juniors, from the NCAA to the AHL, from the “Q” to the Western Hockey League, in all the neighbourhood rinks from coast to coast, where the action starts when the first kid steps on the ice around 6 a.m. and ends when the last beer-leaguer departs, long after midnight.

You can kill the NHL, Gary, but you can’t kill hockey. Sooner or later, Sidney Crosby will find a place to play, because Crosby is the game, not a bunch of New York lawyers who couldn’t find a five-hole with a periscope. Crosby and Martin Brodeur, Evgeni Malkin and Alexander Ovechkin, P.K. Subban and Josh Gorges, even, perhaps most, the journeymen, the guys like Mathieu Darche and Chris Campoli who have faced the best the lawyers can bring and shot it right back at ‘em.

Hockey lives on, in every kid who still needs Dad to tie those pesky skates. In every boy who goes to bed with a stick on his pillow and his arms around his shoulder pads, every girl who wants nothing for Christmas but a Wickenheiser jersey and a chance.

The game was there, long before Ted Lindsay and Doug Harvey stood up to the bosses and first tried to form a union, long before the league started trying to break that union.

The game was there when Henderson scored, when Dryden leaned on his stick, when Morenz died, when the Flower dished to Steve Shutt for a one-timer, when a missed Bobby Hull shot hit the glass like the crack of doom, when Plante donned the mask, when the Rocket got up off a training table in Boston to score the winning goal while he was literally out on his feet, when a suspension handed down by another stiff-necked commissioner touched off a riot and helped to kick-start the Quiet Revolution.

You wouldn’t know about all that, Gary. To you, the game is boardrooms and briefcases, vicious little number games played in order to squeeze every dollar out of the Unnecessary Lockout. To you, hockey is just a league you can shut down on a whim — a game you have shut down, three times now, at your convenience.

Your blinkered, grubby little world is not Saturday night in Peace River, with the temperature outside hovering around minus-37 and the Canucks and Maple Leafs about to tussle on Hockey Night in Canada, when a noisy bar full of tough guys and tough ladies will suddenly fall so quiet you could hear an ice cube drop, right before Don Cherry starts talking. I was in a bar in Peace River on a frigid Saturday night before the 1988 Olympics, and it was a wondrous phenomenon to behold, when the whole rowdy joint went silent for Grapes.

I doubt that you’ve ever set foot in Peace River, or in Chicoutimi, when the Saguenéens play the Remparts, when a tough mama with an air horn offends a lady in a Patrick Roy jersey and pretty soon they’re throwing left hooks like Pierre Bouchard and Dave Schultz, circa 1975.

Those ladies don’t need you to tell them how to punch. They’ll be throwing ‘em all winter long, whether the NHL lives or dies.

Come to think of it, there probably won’t be three consecutive hours all winter when someone isn’t shooting a hockey puck somewhere between Nanaimo and Newfoundland — and if there are, you’ll know that Canada is playing in the world junior final.

Twenty years ago, a guy was telling me about a problem he had every summer in the 1970s, back at his cottage on Cape Breton Island. The same boom! boom! boom! coming from down the road all day long, day after day. Finally, one summer when the sound was louder than ever, he ambled over to find the source of the noise — and met a big, raw-boned 12-year-old named Al MacInnis, who was busy rocketing slapshots off the barn door.

When I think about it, Gary, my son understood the game better when he was 15 months old than you do now. It was during the world juniors and he was busy ignoring the preliminary blather, pushing a ball up and down the basement steps until they played O Canada.

Then he paused, listened for a moment, and grinned from ear to ear: “Hockey!” he said.

That’s Canada. That’s our game. And no matter how hard you try, M. Bettman, you’ll never shut it down.

Heroes: Christine Sinclair, Bob Costas, Anthony Calvillo, Jean Pascal, Adrian Peterson, Tony Gonzalez, Peyton Manning, Lyndon Rush, Jesse Lumsden, Sarah Reid, Tina Maze, Lionel Messi, Arturo Gatti, Michael Whelan, Butler &&&& last but not least, the great game of hockey.

Zeros: Gary Bettman, Murray Edwards, Jeremy Jacobs, Lockout speak, Foghorn Dreghorn, Joe Flacco, the Harbaugh brothers, Eli Manning, Lindsey Vonn, Lolo Jones, Floyd Mayweather Jr., LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo, Nick Saban, Chelsea, Gary Cahill … last but not least, the NRA.

jacktodd46@JackTodd46

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The world champion from Coldwater, Ont., opened the semifinal with three points in the first end and led Winnipeg’s McEwen 6-1 after four ends.

Howard will now play Jeff Stoughton of Winnipeg in Sunday’s final. Stoughton earned an automatic berth to the final after topping the round robin with a 5-1 record.

“It’s going to be another final against Jeff Stoughton, one of the best players on the planet. We’ve got to come out and play like we did today. If we do play like we did today, I like our chances,” said Howard. “If not, we probably won’t win.”

McEwen survived a 9-7 win in the tiebreaker against Calgary’s Kevin Koe earlier Saturday before falling to Howard.

“We started so well this morning, and then it was like we forgot how to curl,” said McEwen. “A lot of mistakes early on. We looked like night and day.”

Meanwhile, Team Jennifer Jones defeated Heather Nedohin of Sherwood Park, Alta., 9-5 in the women’s semifinal to earn a spot in Sunday’s final against Stefanie Lawton of Saskatoon.

Kaitlyn Lawes is handling skip duties for Jones’s Winnipeg rink since Jones gave birth to a baby girl two weeks ago and is also recovering from knee surgery.

“It was a great team game — they set me up very well,” said Lawes. “It was great to keep it close. Heather’s is such a great team and we always have such great games against them.”

The men’s and women’s champions will receive one of the six automatic qualification spots for the 2013 Roar of the Rings — the tournament that will determine Canada’s entries at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

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After Martin’s Edmonton rink scored two in the ninth end to tie the game 6-6, Epping brought the hammer into the decisive 10th end and earned one point to score the upset.

Epping, a native of Peterborough, Ont., scored four in the third end to take a 4-1 lead, but the veteran Martin got back into contention with one in the fourth and a steal of one in the fifth.

In other men’s Draw 1 action at Mosaic Place, Winnipeg’s Jeff Stoughton scored two in the ninth and stole two in the 10th for a 9-5 win over last year’s runner-up, Glenn Howard of Coldwater, Ont.

In women’s action, defending champion Team Jones out of Winnipeg scored four in the fourth end en route to a 9-7 win over Calgary’s Crystal Webster.

Team Jones is being skipped by Kaitlyn Lawes in place of Jennifer Jones, who gave birth to a baby girl two weeks ago. Jones is also recovering from knee surgery.

Saskatoon’s Stefanie Lawton downed Sherry Middaugh of Coldwater 10-4. Lawton scored two in the second end, then had steals of two and three to take a 7-1 lead after four ends.

Draw two goes Wednesday afternoon.

You can top up your caffeine at Tim Hortons, assault your tummy with countless McMeals and wake up under the same faded floral bedspread day after day. As you bomb down the Trans-Canada at record speed, you can arrive at your destination having seen precisely zero local attractions and eating foods that you could just as easily get in the strip mall at home.

It’s predictable. It’s safe. And it’s painfully bland.

I, for one, don’t care to live in a fast-food, mass-produced world where nothing is special anymore. And I don’t want to lose the journey, that precious space between A and B where the lasting memories are made.

When my parents drove from Toronto to Vancouver in the ’70s (three times!), they had no choice but to suck it up and open the door to that small-town restaurant – the one where the entire population was bound to stop chewing and stare. And before that, in the ’50s and ’60s, it was even more of an adventure.

In March, my boyfriend and I drove from Toronto to Victoria. We did the trip retro-style, turning a blind eye to the modern chains and giving our custom only to those regional joints that imbue a place with character. We skirted the major cities, favouring places like Wawa, Brandon, Moose Jaw and Revelstoke and many more small towns.

This video gives you the 2 minute Coles Notes. To see the trip in its entirety, visit the Retro Road Trip homepage or click the icons on the map below.

My initial research turned up nothing so at the end of November I decided to take advantage of The Astonishing Power of Flickr and post my mystery photo to the What’s that Picture? group.  At about the same time I was scanning some old wartime photos of my girlfriend’s maternal grandfather who served and died in the final weeks of World War II.  I posted them (privately) to Flickr so that she and her brother (the family historian) could check them out.

A few days after Christmas a What’s that Picture? group member solved the mystery behind the ‘Street With No Name’.  It was in fact Manitoba Avenue in Moose Jaw Saskatchewan and with that information I was able to pin the photo to Historypin.  Mission accomplished and end of story, right?  Well, no.

Last night my girlfriend’s brother was trying to download the photos I posted of his maternal grandfather who died in the Netherlands in April 1945.  I encouraged him to sign up for a free Flickr account and added him to my contacts list. While do so he discovered the picture of the Park Hotel on Manitoba Avenue.  A few moments later he emailed me the obituary I’ve included here. Remarkably his paternal grandfather died while working in the Park Hotel in 1942!