Good Guys Lose More Than Season

The Great One gagged. Super Mario tumbled.

Even two legends couldn’t fix their dumb-as-an-ice-sculpture sport Saturday, confirming that more than just an entire season has been lost.

Hockey, as a relevant professional sport in this country, is done.

Hockey, on the 25th anniversary of “Do You Believe in Miracles?” has disappeared forever behind a door marked, “Can You Believe Those Idiots?”

Makes you want to grab a poor NHL owner (oxymoron alert!) and ask, what else can you sell for 41 nights at $100 a pop?

Makes you want to grab an anonymous NHL player (redundancy alert!) and ask, you really think you should be paid like Tom Brady?

Makes you want to call Andy Murray.

“Boy,” Murray said Saturday, “this is a real mess.”

On the day the season was canceled for the second time in a week, for good, we think, you knew the plain-speaking King coach would say exactly that.

What is good about L.A.’s hockey guy is exactly what is good about most hockey guys, something that has been terribly lost under the sweaty pads of rhetoric.

Hockey is the most approachable and embraceable of the big sports, remember?

Hockey is the one sport where the players still sign autographs for free, visit hospitals without entourages and the star of the night actually sticks around to wave to the fans.

Hockey is the only sport where a Murray could exist.

To pass the time during the lockout, some guys bought plane tickets to Europe, some guys bought ice time at the local rink, some guys just bought the Hockey News.

Andy Murray bought an entire team.

The Santa Fe Roadrunners of the Junior A North American Hockey League.

The amateur team was actually based in Fort Worth and called the Lone Star Cavalry, but the owner went bankrupt and the coach skipped town and Murray and some buddies, including three former Kings, bailed them out.

“They were a hockey team with no home,” Murray said. “We wanted to give them a home.”

So Murray and a local dentist brought this group of teens to Santa Fe, N.M., put them up in a community center, and Murray changed their name to the Missions. After a couple of games, Murray’s partners, who include Rob Blake and Glen Murray, protested.

“It was like, how are you going to have a church as a mascot?” said dentist Erick Carlgren. “Can we put a church on a uniform?”

Thus the Roadrunners were born, each home game witnessed by 500 or so folks who have usually never seen hockey before but who understand the absolute best part of this league.

“No salaries,” said Murray.

But the same old Andy.

During his first visit there, he stopped his first pep talk in mid-sentence.

He told the players to take their legs off chairs, take hats off heads and pay attention.

He told them that he didn’t believe in second chances, that they had to make the most of their first chance.

Then he took a bunch of kids who had been living in Texas and skated them for several hours at 7,000 feet.

“It was, as you can imagine, quite a scene,” said Carlgren. “Lots of people still couldn’t believe an NHL coach would be down here doing this.”

The team has responded, losing only 14 of its first 41 games, prompting another visit this weekend from Murray.

Said Carlgren: “This time he told them he expected them not only to make the playoffs, but to win the championship.”

Said Murray: “Hey, it’s all hockey, right?”

Well, it used to be, which makes this weekend’s last breaths so senseless.

Hockey’s charm has always been that, even in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals, it was always just a blue line away from being a bunch of kids on a Toronto pond.

The same haircuts in the playoffs. The same handshakes after playoff series. The same at Staples Center as in that Santa Fe community center.

Can you imagine a baseball manager and his former players chipping in to buy and motivate a minor-league team during their 1994 labor dispute?

Can you imagine an NBA coach and his players even talking to one another during their work stoppage?

Only hockey could make such a brutal sport seem so human.

Ironically, perhaps because of this very trait, only hockey could figure out a way to inhumanely destroy that reputation.

The hard-core fans will eventually come back. Some fool will eventually put it back on television. Maybe, one day, somebody at home will even watch.

But the bond is broken. The charm is gone. The small-town neighbor has become just another big-city thief.

Of all the sports, hockey always had the best guys, period. But now, how hard will it be for anybody to look at these guys as anything other than spoiled millionaires?

“That’s one of the most unfortunate things about all this,” said Murray. “The players’ reputations are going to take a hit, and I don’t know if that’s justified. They’re the same guys.”

But are they? Will anything in the NHL ever again be the same? Jack O’Callahan, a member of that 1980 U.S. Olympic team, chuckled.

“Twenty-five years ago, right about now, was the beginning of the greatest sports event in the history of sports events,” he said. “And now, you have billionaire owners and multimillionaire players who can’t even agree on how to play that same game?”

Where once he might have treated this anniversary with a certain solemnity, O’Callahan only laughed.

Do you believe in the NHL? Never again.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.