The season, which will have each team playing either 48 or 50 games, is expected to begin in 10 to 14 days. For the Bruins, that could mean they open their downsized 2012-’13 season Jan. 17 in Ottawa or Jan. 19 in Montreal, but that’s only if the league picks up the schedule that was released last summer. If so, Boston’s first home game would be Jan. 21 vs. Toronto, a 1 p.m. matinee on Martin Luther King Day. All regular-season play is expected to have clubs playing only within their respective conferences.

In the end, the league’s 30 owners got most of what they wanted most — a far more significant share of the revenue pie, which last season was a $3.3 billion business (total revenue) . For at least the next eight years, possibly 10, the two sides will split evenly every dollar that funnels to the cash drawer, a dramatic swing from the expired CBA that had the players collecting 57 percent of the take since the start of the 2005-’06 season.

While percentage points may seem a trifle, that drop of seven percentage points would deliver $231 million each season to the owners’ side of the ledger, based on the league’s most recent revenues. Even if that number were to remain static, it would mean the owners claw back an additional $2.3 billion over the length of the new 10-year deal. Each side has the right to terminate the new pact after eight years.

So, was it all worth it? Only these next months and years will tell, but the answer will be delivered, as always, by the consumer.

This was the third lockout in league history, and the fans always have returned, actually as record spenders following the lost season of 2004-’05. What remains to be seen now, though, is whether a third lockout will be the game’s proverbial third strike, with fans too angry, alienated and turned off this time to buy tickets and merchandise and snubbing such emerging marketing devices as the NHL Network and nhl.com.

Another huge income sector possibly damaged: corporate sponsorships. Fan interest could remain strong, but what of the likes of big car companies, beverage and tire makers, insurance providers and big pharmaceutical manufacturers? Many of those sectors grew significantly over the last two decades, especially in the new NHL that emerged following the ‘04-’05 lockout. League bosses and no doubt players themselves will have to work hard to re-engage the game’s biggest spenders.

Of equal importance now to the game, the industry and the fans, however, is for the two sides for the first time in their history to construct a true, meaningful partnership. A CBA is just a document, a business blueprint, but it in no ways defines a culture or spirit of mutual interest. For too long, even pre-dating the first lockout of 1994-’95, players and owners have co-existed in a rancid relationship.

Owners, under the direction of commissioner Gary Bettman, have been too quick to resort to locking the door amid what they’ve contended to be perpetual financial strife. The players, led by a gong show of executive directors, have been too slow in engaging in meaningful CBA dialogue with owners, driven first and foremost by raking every available dollar off the table (not unlike the owners), while refusing to recognize or even acknowledge the quirky financial dynamics inherent in co-crafting a successful business model for 30 teams, 23 of which do business in the US, some of them in very challenged hockey markets.

It’s imperative this time that the NHL and the NHLPA work on their marriage, and not plot, scheme and connive how they’ll sashay into or around another lockout in, say, Sept. 2020 (the eighth-year opt out). Of course, if the fans indeed don’t come back this time, the two sides will have little choice but to work on hockey harmony.

In that sense, fans have always acted as the enablers in the lockout dynamic, their unwavering loyalty ever-emboldening owners to lock the doors and players to resist financial reformation. Some 200 of the rank-and-file, who last season earned an average $2.4 million, bolted to play for very little money in European leagues during the lockout — a move that to some fans and media underscored their indifference toward working toward a resolution here.