Three people prefaced a comment to me about the U.S.-Canada gold-medal game with this sentence or a variation of it: "I'm not a hockey fan, but "

That isn't exactly scientific evidence that the Olympics exposed the NHL to people who normally run the other way at the sight of it, but the ratings do support the idea: 25 million Americans watched the game Sunday, three times more than saw Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals last season between Pittsburgh and Detroit, which drew the NHL's largest TV audience in 36 years.

The 17.6 overnight rating for U.S.-Canada also was significantly higher than the best-rated World Series game in the past five years and almost twice as high as the Boston-L.A. Lakers rematch in the NBA Finals two years ago.

Maybe that's why I find NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's waffling over whether the league will participate in the 2014 Games almost as entertaining as the game itself. He has been trying to make it sound as if it's the toughest choice the NHL has had to make since it decided to expand beyond the Original Six.

I don't buy it. The 2014 Winter Olympics are in Russia, where a new pro league has been giving the NHL fits by luring some of its players back home. The Continental Hockey League badly wants the NHL in Sochi in 2014, and so does the International Ice Hockey Federation, which doesn't have a transfer agreement in place with the NHL. Think we might be able to find a negotiating ploy within all of Bettman's agonizing?

Knowing that the players dearly love the chance to represent their home countries, think Bettman wouldn't be willing to use that as a bargaining chip during union negotiations in 2012?

There are costs to the NHL, to be sure. For example, there doesn't seem much doubt that the Blue Jackets paid a price so that the rest of us could be glued to our televisions Sunday. If the NHL weren't participating in the Olympics, the Blue Jackets might have gotten a third- or fourth-round draft pick for defenseman Milan Jurcina at the trade deadline Wednesday. Because Jurcina was found to have a sports hernia he suffered while playing for Slovakia, his stock took a precipitous drop.

The Jackets settled for a conditional sixth-round pick in a deal with Washington, the team that sent him to Columbus in the trade for Jason Chimera. Third-round picks often become good NHL players, so this might represent a sizable loss down the road to a small-market team that can least afford it. Was one afternoon of exciting hockey on network television worth it?

Well, yeah, it really was. The NHL has a terrific product that is largely unknown to a significant segment of American sports fans. There aren't many effective ways to reach them, and the Olympics are probably the best. If you tell a lot of people that the U.S. had a chance to win a gold medal, they will watch snowboarding, curling and, yes, even hockey games. Patriotism rules.

Sometimes, NHL teams do get penalized for their participation. If Rick Nash had gotten hurt trying to win the gold for Canada and cost the Blue Jackets a chance to make the playoffs, it would have gone down hard for most Columbus hockey fans.

But if the game is going to grow in this country, this is one of the best available ways to grow it. If some kid in Columbus, Dayton or Cincinnati who doesn't normally watch hockey was star-struck by the gold-medal game, maybe he will pester dad for a stick and some skates and eventually involve the entire family.

The NHL can't afford to ignore this kind of marketing opportunity. It's hard to believe it would even consider it.

Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.

bhunter@dispatch.com