On Jan. 6, I woke up to a text from one of my friends that the NHL owners and players had tentatively agreed to end the four month long lockout.

I don’t really think I need to explain the joy this brought me; if you’re a hockey fan, you know what hearing that news felt like. If you aren’t, but like the NFL or NBA, you probably experienced that feeling last year when each league resolved their respective lockouts.

After four months of anger turned to disappointment and disappointment turned to apathy, the NHL was finally back.

But the longer I thought about it, the more perplexed I became about the whole situation. Yes, it’s great that the sport is back. But I shouldn’t be this excited because the season is simply starting. I mean, that should be a given every year, right?

With the NHL, that hasn’t exactly been the case. Now with three work stoppages in my lifetime — albeit only two that I can remember — every time the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement expires going forward, fans are undoubtedly going to be holding their breath.

Now that the whole ordeal is over and I can look back on it without an angry bias, it’s really hard for me to direct blame to any one side.

Throughout the lockout, I generally had more sympathy for the players. That was on the sole basis that I too would be upset if my employer was making record revenues, yet asked me to take a pay cut for no other reason than he wants more profit for himself.

While I don’t necessarily agree with it, I can understand where the owners were coming from as well. As much as we don’t like to admit it, every professional sports league is a business and one of the main objectives of a business is to turn a profit.

The system set under the old CBA had its flaws that needed to be fixed. But a cost of fixing them didn’t need to be the first half of this season.

Salary cap circumvention with front-loaded contracts, small-budget teams being forced to spend more money on player salaries than they could afford due to the salary floor, those things could have — and should have — been taken care of long before the CBA expired.

The thing that will always irk me about this particular work stoppage is what seemed like a general disregard for fans and arena workers, the two parties hurt the most by this work stoppage.

In their squabble about how to divide $3.3 billion, the league and the players seemed to forget about the people who pay their own hard-earned money so that there would be $3.3 billion to fight over.

Now, to their credit, several teams have issued statements to their fans publicly apologizing for the lockout.

And, to his credit, Commissioner Gary Bettman did the same thing.

But you know the saying “talk is cheap”? With three work stoppages in under 20 years, that’s what comes to my mind when I read his apology. It’s like the kid who always gets in trouble, then promises his parents it won’t happen again every time: His word means very little.

But, at least now people get to formulate their opinions about Bettman and the rest of the people involved in the lockout, while actually watching hockey.