I love hockey. I love the speed and the chaos and the way a playoff overtime makes you forget to breathe. But I need to talk about something that's been sitting heavy in my chest every time I look at ticket prices.

The NHL salary cap has never been higher. That should be a celebration, right? More money for the players. Bigger deals for the guys who put their bodies on the line every single night. Good. Great. They deserve every dollar.

The Deseret News pulled numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Statistics showing inflation alone accounts for a 68 percent increase from the initial salary cap to where we are now. Sixty-eight percent. Just keeping pace with what things cost.

And if the cap climbed that much to match the cost of living, think about what's happening to everything else around the game. Tickets. Parking. A jersey because your kid fell in love with a player and they HAVE to have it or they'll cry and you kind of want to cry too because that jersey is a car payment. Hot dogs. Drinks. You sit down and you've already spent what used to cover a whole season of nights out.

I keep thinking about the dad who used to take his daughter to every Saturday game. Or the college friends who had standing seats in the 300 level. Those people are getting priced out. Slowly, quietly, game by game.

The system is doing what it was built to do. The cap goes up because the league makes more money, and the players get their share. The math is the math. But I don't cover systems. I cover people.

And the people I keep thinking about are the ones in the upper deck who saved up for months to be there. The ones who ate dinner before the game because arena food isn't in the budget. The ones who feel lucky to go to one game a year instead of ten.

I think about old barns like Chicago Stadium, where the building would literally shake and the fans were basically part of the team. That energy came from a building full of regular people. Working people. People who could afford to be there night after night and gave the whole sport its heartbeat.

The cap going up means the league is healthy. I get that. More revenue, more eyes on the game, more kids dreaming of lifting the Cup. All of that matters.

But a sport is only as alive as the fans who fill the seats. And when the seats get too expensive to fill, something gets lost that no cap number can measure.

I don't have a solution. I just have this knot in my stomach. We're watching something precious slip away from the exact people who made it precious in the first place.

The cap will keep climbing. The jerseys will keep getting more expensive. And somewhere a kid is going to fall in love with hockey for the first time, and their parents are going to do the math and wonder if they can afford for this to be their thing.

That breaks my heart a little. Straight up, it does.