It was only a few short years ago that hockey fans watched an entire season cancelled because of a labour dispute, and now lacrosse fans are facing the same ordeal.

The NHL lockout was the first time an entire season had been cancelled in the North American professional sports world, and now it looks like the National Lacrosse League will be following in their footsteps.

The league and lacrosse players association are at an impasse over, what else, money. Professional lacrosse players can make a maximum of $25,000 a year, rookies only pull in around $7,000, which is a far cry from the millions we watch NHL, MLB and NBA players ‘earn' a year. The majority of the NLL players have full-time jobs during the work week and moonlight as a professional athlete on weekends. On the Rock you'll find everything from teachers and equity brokers to salesmen and SWAT team members.

What that means is that these are guys who play the sport because they actually love it, not because it's profitable. And I can speak from experience on that because in high school my kinesiology and gym teacher was Jim Veltman, captain and 10-year veteran of the Toronto Rock. Veltman, normally a soft-spoken man, is one of the leagues hardest workers and most talented players. Veltman brought his love of the sport to the school in the form of class lecturers on human kinetics from the team and player-coaches for the school teams. In fact it wasn't uncommon for the opposing team players after a game to ask to get ‘Scoop's' autograph before boarding their team bus.

But the sport, whose popularity is growing in Toronto, averaged a crowd of over 16,000 people at Rock home games last season at the ACC, good for second in league attendance. The Rock, since their creation in 1999, have won seven division titles and five championships, making them the most dominant Toronto pro team since the Maple Leafs won four titles in the 1960's.

And the cancellation of the season may well be the end to some of the newer NLL teams, such as the Boston Blazers who were set to play their first season this year, and will also put the league in a very deep hole when it comes to attracting fans in one years' time.

A sport whose popularity relies heavily on Ontario, pockets in western Canada, and the northern American states, cannot afford to lose an entire season just as it's starting to gain momentum and draw from a wider range of fans, especially considering it had signed recent contracts with Versus and NBC in the USA and The Score in Canada.

And for NLL and Toronto Rock fans, such as myself, it leaves us high and dry, and in my case left cheering solely for the Leafs, a perennially mediocre team at best.

So, echoing one of the Rock's defensemen, Dan Ladouceur, in a recent interview with the Toronto Star: “I'm disappointed that (both sides) couldn't meet somewhere in the middle, I'm disappointed we won't be playing, I'm disappointed that it's bad for the league.”

And I'm disappointed I won't get to see a good team make another run at a championship.