Within a month or so, North America will regain its fourth major sport. Or will it?

After a year-long work stoppage, the National Hockey League is returning to the sports scene. The league will now be forced to deal with what Major League Baseball faced after its season-ending 1994 strike: an apathetic and in some cases angry fan base. Hockey fans are disgusted with both sides of this labor battle, as baseball fans were when the '94 World Series was canceled (robbing the then-Montreal Expos of their only real chance at a title).

It only gets worse for the NHL: even before the strike, popular interest in hockey within the United States was waning. Relocated teams like Carolina and Phoenix, and expansion clubs like Tampa Bay and Atlanta, were already finding it hard to attract warm-weather crowds to the game, even as many of them were advancing in the Stanley Cup playoffs. (Tampa Bay won the Cup in 2004.)

This week, the NHL suffered its latest indignity: ESPN, which had hosted its regular season along with ABC, refused to pick up NHL coverage for the next several seasons. The league signed with the Outdoor Life Network, which will use hockey to fill in the holes in a schedule which consists of the Tour de France in July and, I believe, every fishing show known to man. NBC had already scooped up broadcast rights for the next two seasons, paying no license fee and offering the NHL a profit-sharing deal similar to its deal with Arena Football. These are desperation deals. One step lower, and soccer will be the number four sport in the US.

That's all great, you say, what does this have to do with podcasting? If the NHL is smart, plenty.

The NHL is going to need a full-court press to get and keep the fans' attention and interest. OLN will also need to increase its exposure, as it treats its NHL content as a draw for its other programming. And Comcast, which owns OLN, is heavily invested in digital cable and broadband Internet. Comcast will be pushing NHL content on its on-demand cable services as well as online.

So, we're most of the way there: a sports league and a television network both with a vested interest in reaching people more people than they currently have access to. This is a great situation for podcasting, and even better for video in RSS enclosures. I don't think we're quite ready for full-game feeds, and we may never need them, given the real-time nature of sporting events. But OLN will be creating hockey-related content around their coverage, and that's no good to them if nobody is watching it at 11pm. They will already be offering it on demand. Why not serve an MPEG for download on their own broadband network?

Even more interesting are the place-shifting opportunities. A large number of fans in the southern and western US hail from colder climes. Many, surprisingly, are even Canadian. I, for one, grew up a Boston Bruins fan, but over the years, I couldn't find any Bruins coverage after I moved away, and so I'm limited to what ESPN gives me in the morning. But what if there were a daily podcast of, say, five to ten minutes, for each home team? Many of these shows could be hosted by Comcast's regional sports network personalities -- who, naturally, would have access to the players themselves via the OLN deal. And finding podcasters to cover each of the Canadian teams would be like trying to find a cat who likes to watch mice. These are low-cost activities that would bring real fans in, wherever they may live. Fans who buy tickets, gear, and Internet access.

While the other major sports in the US are all still swirling their toes in the online water with monthly subscription charges for streaming content, the NHL has a real chance to rebuild by letting more people in. There are millions of monthly impressions to be had. Even OLN and Comcast stand to benefit in this arrangement by increasing their own profile. It would be fascinating for everyone involved to see the league and the network take such a bold step.