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The National Lacrosse League has a ton of work to do over the next week, but finally agreeing to a new collective bargaining agreement is ultimately a positive outcome for the players and the owners. If you think those guys are exhausted now — I know I am from covering this thing — their work is only beginning.

It absolutely baffles me how we wound up at this point. Obviously, the owners were willing to negotiate all along. And obviously, the players wanted to play in 2008. So was the league canceling the season Oct. 16 a negotiating ploy? Commissioner Jim Jennings said Thursday that it wasn’t.

If not, then what happened? Did the owners want to cancel the season all along, then get flooded with complaints from sponsors and fans and realize they didn’t properly estimate the impact of their decision? Did the PLPA misread the league’s sincerity on canceling the season in the first place? Did a few emails get lost in cyberspace?

Now that some of the dust has cleared, we have a better picture of just how dramatic the effects are of canceling the season. Some teams lost home games. The season might not start in late December or end in mid-May like it was supposed to. There might be less games and less teams. Some teams might have to play in different venues (I’ve heard the Spectrum in Philly, the new Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., and Nassau Coliseum all mentioned as possible temporary homes of NLL games this year).

One source told me he wouldn’t be surprised if 3-4 teams went dark this year on top of Boston. But another told me no one is going dark. IL’s Brian Shanahan brings up a good point on that subject. If teams wanted to come back in ’09, giving up their players and starting over in another year isn’t really logical. They couldn’t just “lend” their players to another team for a year.

I heard for the second time last night from a league source saying InsideLacrosse.com’s coverage of this situation may have actually influenced the outcome — our continued coverage might have helped keep this thing going. Kudos to Shanny and Steve Kojima on great coverage, start to finish (although it’s not over yet).

Stay tuned to IL.com for the latest on the 2008 season. This is a colossal mess. Which makes it all the more amazing that the league canceled the season in the first place.

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