NOTE: As always, this appeared first at RandBall, your home for sweaters.

The NHL lockout is over, and I would like to tell you that you have a easy way to punish the owners, players, or both – to show your disapproval of a months-long process that accomplished, ultimately, very little. Unfortunately, that’s not true. You could stay away, I suppose; you could stop going to games, and buying merchandise, and watching games on TV, but if you are a hockey fan then you and I both know that you’re not going to do any of that. You’ve been checking line charts all week. You’ve been trying to figure out a way to not hate Zach Parise for going to North Dakota. In short, you are going to cave.

I know this because I know that if you’re an NHL hockey fan, you must be a die-hard NHL hockey fan, because there are no casual NHL fans left. Labor strife, nonexistent television contracts, and the overarching control of the sports world by the hockey atheists at ESPN have combined to make the NHL no better than a niche sport in vast swaths of America – the NASCAR of the north, if you will. Even in Minnesota, the country’s most hockey-mad state, it’s no better than fourth place.

The great thing, though, is that you, my dear hockey fan, couldn’t care any less. All the games are televised and St. Paul is still a fun place to be on game night and that’s really all you care about – not TV ratings or why Steven Stamkos isn’t more famous or whether the news or the sports page leads with last night’s Wild game. I can call hockey all the names I want and it won’t hurt me or any other die-hard hockey fan. We’re just glad the circus is back in town.

So welcome back, NHL. We yelled and screamed at you for being idiots all fall, and while your surpassing stupidity hasn’t changed, our love for the game hasn’t changed either. It’s good to see you again. Now let’s drop the puck and forget this whole thing ever happened.

*On with the links:

*Down Goes Brown has a list of surprises in the new NHL CBA. And, in one of the year’s most amazing posts (in a I-can’t-believe-they-went-to-the-trouble kind of way), DGB and Bloge Salming also detail the negotiations that ended the lockout in a parody of Eminem’s “Guilty Conscience.”

*Will Leitch has some news for you about the NBC Sports Network – it’s surprisingly good, especially when it is as little like ESPN as possible.

*Here’s the whole seedy story of Curt Schilling and the state government conspired to waste a whole lot of Rhode Island taxpayer money.

*And finally: I think I’ve figured out why nothing ever seems to go right for Gopher football. Clearly, the jerks on the other side of the ND border have stolen all the good karma.

The North American Soccer League released the first details of the league’s 2013 season on Thursday, announcing a schedule of twelve games per team for the Spring half of the championship, set to take place between the beginning of April and July 4. The winner of this phase plays the winner of the fall half of the schedule (which will ostensibly run from August through mid-November) for the NASL championship. Seven teams will play in the spring, with the expansion New York Cosmos participating in the fall along with league member Puerto Rico, which has chosen to skip the spring season to reorganize for the fall.

(Confusing? Sure. But the league’s so hell-bent on promoting the return of the Cosmos that a two-half schedule wasn’t a problem for them. On Twitter, some wags suggested that the two halves of the year would be called “Preseason” and “Cosmos.”)

Closer to home, the Stars will play five of their six spring home games in the Metrodome, with just the July 4 date being played at their traditional home at the National Sports Center. Minnesota opens the year April 6 at home against San Antonio, the team they knocked out of the playoffs last fall thanks, in part, to a headbutt from Scorpions striker Pablo Campos.

The Stars played last year’s season opener at the Metrodome as well, drawing 0-0 with Carolina.

Minnesota will also get an Independence Day home game, their lone outdoor home game of the spring season, against Atlanta.

Spring training seems so close that we can almost reach out and touch it. Monday at Twinkie Town, I enumerated just how close it was – with a few helpful dates thrown in, like, “day on which Ron Gardenhire starts drinking openly during press conferences.”

NOTE: As always, this appeared first at RandBall.

Last Sunday’s Vikings-Packers classic has occasioned a number of comparisons to the Twins’ win over Detroit in 2009’s Game 163 – two division rivals battling on the last day of the regular season, with our local heroes in a win-or-go-home situation. When it was over, with the Purple victorious, euphoria seemed to be the emotion that carried the day. Drew Magary wrote that he cried after the win. Local curmudgeon Patrick Reusse tweeted that it was one of the top five games in Dome history, and even started engaging in mathematical hyperbole to taunt Packer fans. Closer to home, RandBall wrote that the game was “exhilarating” and called it one of his favorite five games ever.

Despite this, you can hardly find a Vikings fan who really believes the team will win tonight. The Packers are eight-point favorites, and though it’s an increasingly lost season, the smart money’s on Green Bay. And for all the comparisons to Game 163, Twins fans felt the same way, post-game; the win only gave the local nine a playoff series against New York, where the Yankees summarily (and expectedly) dispatched them in three games. I desperately wanted the Vikings to win Sunday, but – just like Game 163 – when it was over, all I felt was a sense of relief, not euphoria or exhilaration. They didn’t miss the playoffs. Whew.

It wasn’t until hours later, when I began reading the reactions of others, that I realized that most other Vikings fans were treating the game as one of the great Vikes games ever. And even now, a week later, I still feel a little cheated. Nobody told me that euphoria was a legitimate reaction, and so I missed out on last week’s mass delirium – a shame, because sports-related mass delirium is one of my favorite feelings. So I have a request for the Vikings: please win again this week. This time, I promise, I won’t be looking ahead to next week.

*On with the links:

*Commenter Stu, who is the best, wrote “An Oral History of Nick Punto Sliding Headfirst Into First Base” for Twinkie Town, and it is excellent.

*Meanwhile, at Twins Daily, Parker Hageman interviewed Twins Director of Baseball Research Jack Goin, to get an idea of what the team is doing with advanced baseball metrics.

*Steve McPherson at A Wolf Among Wolves explains the Wolves’ improbable win over Denver, sight unseen, with a discussion of the observer effect and quantum mechanics.

*From Sports Media Watch, here’s a list of the fifty highest-rated sporting events last year – 49 of which were NFL games or Olympics telecasts. Perhaps more interesting is the chart of the highest-rated event in each sport, which puts the highest-rated NHL telecast behind events in golf, men’s and women’s tennis, horse racing, and – shockingly – IndyCar. In fact, the highest-rated NHL game (Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals) finished barely ahead of the top-rated telecasts in MMA, second-string NASCAR racing, college women’s basketball, and women’s national team soccer. But no, guys, great time for a lockout. I’m sure all the fans will come roaring back.

*And finally: we may not have pro hockey this year, but we’ll always have Down Goes Brown.

2013 is at hand, and with that in mind – and with a Monday column to write and no good ideas – I made some Twins-related New Year’s resolutions for 2013.

I can’t quite explain this, but it’s become a tradition for me to write a Christmas-week Twins column in the style of Larry King’s old USA Today columns. Mostly, it’s just a cheap and easy structure for dumb jokes, which somehow works, at holiday time.

Here’s this year’s edition, as “Larry” struggles to understand geography or find appropriate cat wear.

*NOTE: As always, this also appears at RandBall, your home for the merriest of Christmases. *

Merry Christmas to all! When you think about it, Christmas is probably the closest thing we have to a universal day off; few people work the day, with the exception of essential services, some gas stations, and (at least in the movies) Chinese restaurants. It’s the one day of the year that virtually everyone expects to have a chance to spend with their families. Even Scrooge gave Bob Crachit the day off on Christmas Day.

The one exception to this rule seems to be sports, where the NBA has no compunction about ruining Christmases far and wide. The league has a quintupleheader scheduled for Tuesday; you’ll be able to watch basketball from 11am to midnight, should you so desire. It’s one thing for the home teams, who theoretically will get a chance to have Christmas morning and/or Christmas dinner fit around their schedules, but those five games have five road teams, all of whom are away from their families this holiday. The Celtics, Knicks, Rockets, Thunder, and Nuggets – sorry, guys. You’re spending your Christmas on a plane and in a hotel room.

Speaking of the players is to say nothing, too, of to the thousands of other people who’ll miss Christmas thanks to these games. Stadium staff, team personnel, TV crews, team beat writers – all of these folks have to give up their Christmases as well, thanks to the league’s desire for holiday hoops. Spare a thought as well for a few college football teams – the Gophers among them – that have Christmas Day scheduling issues. For example, the Gophers don’t play until Friday, but they’ll leave for the game on Wednesday – meaning that, for players that came to the U from further afield than the Upper Midwest, they might not have the chance to spend the day with family on Christmas.

The jokes all say that most people can’t wait to escape their families on Christmas, but the truth is that most of us relish the chance to get together and celebrate. This year, though, I’ll be thinking about all of those people who give up that chance as a blessing to the rest of us – not just nurses and doctors and firefighters, but Kevin Durant and James Harden, and all of the ESPN announcers, and the Staples Center staffers, and all of the football players across the country who’ll eat Christmas dinner in a team lounge. Merry Christmas, everyone. Thanks for giving up your day to make it better for the rest of us.

On with the links:

*I want to print out this Steve Rushin column about hockey, and hand-deliver a copy to every owner, possibly by stapling it to his forehead. If somebody wanted to dump a hundred thousand copies on the houses of Jeremy Jacobs and Craig Leipold, I’ll start buying printer ink. Dear NHL: You’re not alienating casual fans now; none of them now exist. You’re alienating your actual fans, and we’re a disappearing breed. You’re on your way to second place in CANADA, for cripes’ sake, and if you lose Canada you might as well fold up shop.

*This three-part interview at The Classical with the guys behind Fire Joe Morgan was absolutely delightful. Here’s Part 1, here’s part two, and here’s part three.

*Brian Phillips of Grantland heads to the rodeo finals in Las Vegas, and the whole thing becomes a wonderful mishmash of one part stranger-in-a-strange-land diary, one part Vegas travel journalism, and one part elegiac rumination on his lost Oklahoma childhood. It’s tremendous.

*And finally: not only am I now convinced that squash should be an Olympic sport, I’m also convinced that it is the greatest sport ever invented.

Boy howdy, but are the Timberwolves up and down. They won four in a row, then lost to Orlando; they got slaughtered by the Heat, then beat the Thunder, in the span of three days. There are no sure things. Will Nik Pekovic make his layups? Will Kevin Love get his shots to fall? Will Good J.J. Barea show up, or will we see Bad J.J.? Will Andrei Kirilenko pull the team out of the fire yet again? Will Dante Cunningham  and Greg Stiemsma and Derrick Williams make a meaningful contribution, or will they show up and flounder and end up -18 for the night?

All of these things are up in the air on a nightly basis, which is why the team is so up and down – the subject of my week seven review at SB Nation Minnesota.

The Twins seem to be looking for something specific on the free-agent pitching market. So far, those qualities seem to be “kinda cheap” and “not that good at pitching.”

They could probably put together a job application that would make the whole process a little clearer – something like this, really.

NOTE: This also appeared at RandBall, as always.

The desperate thrashings of Vikings quarterback Christian Ponder have made this year’s edition of the Vikings one of the strangest I can recall. I’ve seen great Vikings teams and awful Vikings teams, the overachieving and the underachieving, the frustrating, and that one year with Jim McMahon that still confuses me to this day, but I’ve never had quite the same reaction as a fan as I’ve had to this year’s team. For the first time that I can recall, I don’t feel bad when the Vikings lose.

By all reckonings, this is an immensely frustrating season. Minnesota’s blessed with Adrian Peterson, one of the great rushers in NFL history, and has cobbled together an average-to-decent defense. Out of the ashes of an awful 2011 have come what is potentially a pretty good playoff team, except for the team’s pre-war-esque inability to use the forward pass. Even a mediocre passing offense might have the Vikings at 8-5 or 9-4, with a chance of winning the division, but Ponder’s sketchy quarterbacking has doomed the team to the outside fringes of the playoff picture.

This came to a head two weeks ago, in Green Bay, when Minnesota might well have won the game if only Ponder had spiked the ball into the ground every time he dropped back instead of attempting to throw the ball to a receiver. Like many of you, I’m cursed with a Packer fan in my office; in my case, it’s much worse, given that my office’s resident Packer fan is a Minnetonka native who gave up on the Vikings years ago. Normally, when the Vikings lose to the Packers, I dread going into the office. I dread having to talk about the game. I dread the horrible feelings of personal responsibility that I’ve never been able to avoid after a Purple loss.

This year, though, I had a reaction I’ve never had before. My overarching thought, as the Vikings went down, was simple: I am not going to feel bad just because Christian Ponder can’t throw the ball straight. I know he’s terrible. Everyone knows he’s terrible, except for apparently the Vikings staff and front office. And for the first time ever, I’m not going to feel responsible for that; I’m not going to feel bad just because nobody wants to tell the emperor that he has no clothes and that throwing off his back foot is a terrible idea.

I’m still desperate for the Vikings to win, of course. I’ll still be shouting at the television come noon tomorrow. But for once, no taunts can hurt me. I’m not responsible for this one. This one’s all them.

On with the links:

*Parker Hageman thinks that Justin Morneau could well be Texas-bound before this off-season is over.

*As the NHL lockout stretches into its 47th year (note: approximate), Charles Pierce reminds us that, despite what the NHL wants you to think, this is not Don Fehr’s fault.

*TVFury interviews Will Leitch, who’s one of my favorite writers, and still seems like a nice guy from the Midwest even though he’s been in New York for years.

*Only The Economist can use the phrase “the peculiar economic logic of top-tier American college football” in an article about the annual offseason college coaching carousel.

*And finally: Winona and Red Wing have decided to introduce a trophy to their high school hockey matchup (which they’re calling the River City Showdown), and after much thought, apparently the trophy is, um, a rope. It does double duty: it symbolizes barge ropes on the river, and the winning team gets to use it to pull each other out of the ditch all winter!