If only things had gone as you hoped, you would right now be nursing the sweet and sleepy afterglow that always follows a Habs-Senators season opener. You would be gearing up for Detroit at Edmonton tonight. You would be giddy with anticipation over the Leafs at New Jersey on Friday. You would be positively sick over the first Hockey Night in Canada of the season, Ottawa at Toronto, 7:00pm on Saturday. Too bad for you. You are sad. You could use a bit of cheer.

The good news is that you are getting some. ESPN NHL 2K5 is just about the greatest hockey video game you have ever played. It is exciting beyond words. It looks terrific. It is liberal with its use of that shoulder-pads-slamming-into-boards sound. It is easy and comfortable to pick up, but will take you all season to master. It does not feature Don Cherry. It will fill that empty place in your heart.

The game does its level best to pretend there is no lockout. Gary Thorne and Bill Clement welcome us into the Air Canada Centre (or the Bell Centre or the Saddledome or the Glendale Arena or what have you), and the crowd roars, and then the puck drops. Then we glue our eyes to the action.

We sneer as we find ourselves sprawling on the ice. We grin as the player whose stick put us there is led away to the penalty box. We sigh as the shorthanded team repeatedly ices the puck, because our power-play is still a little rusty at this time of year. And then we all go "whoa!" when the first big scoring chance finally arrives.

Yes, you will do that. It will be involuntary and loud and you will follow it with some choice curse words when the puck hits the post. But in the moment, when that first "whoa!" leaves your lips, you will feel your chest thump with giddy familiarity. Yes, hockey really is back, the league and the players be damned.

If you are a fan and you are feeling blue today, that is probably all you wanted to hear. ESPN NHL 2K5 is authentic through and through. It is the drink of water that will quench your aching thirst. But here is the real surprise. Even if you are not a fan, even if you are glad hockey is gone and you hope it stays away, you will find much to love here. You will find an experience brimming with twitchy delicious thumby moments. You will be surprised and delighted. You will find a video game.

Well, duh, you are saying, of course it's a video game. True. But sports video games, for all their astronomic sales and pop-culture cachet, have a terrible habit of forgetting to be video games proper. They simulate and they motion-capture and they come with 300-page playbooks and franchise modes and stats up the wazoo. Those are the things sports fans seek out in their newspapers, in their TV networks, in their pools. Those are things sports fans like.

People who are not sports fans think playbooks and franchise modes are stupid. And this is what many sports video game publishers forget. They forget that the beginning and the end of the video game experience is the answer to this question: How does it feel under the thumbs? Here, in ESPN NHL 2K5, the answer is unequivocal. It feels amazing.

Setting up fancy-pants plays with elaborate cross-ice passes feels like something you have spent your life practicing, even when you are doing it for the first time. You will rifle off a slapshot without needing to look in the manual first to see which buttons to push. You will find yourself skating backward on defence and dropping to block shots not because you have memorized the right key sequences, but because you know you can't afford to let Saku Koivu get near the net without clogging up a few laneways.

This is the challenge of interface design: to make the button taps and the joystick wiggles vanish, leaving just the player and the game. Here, the execution is transcendent. No, it is irresistible. Hate hockey all you like. You will still love ESPN NHL 2K5. This is one of the best games of the year.