Among the many theories on how the National Hockey League governors will vote to revise the league's division format and schedule when they convene on Dec. 5, this is the one that makes the most sense: It will depend on the weather at Pebble Beach.

If it's nice out, they will trade Detroit for Winnipeg and go golfing.

If it's blowing a gale and the rain's coming in sideways, they will heave a sigh of regret, call for the coffee cart, don the brass knuckles and get down to a serious attempt to leave the most influential teams happy and everyone else grumbling.

Because, of course, there is no 100 per cent right answer.

Even a brief summary of all the realignment ideas that have been floated so far would take us all into next week. Bob McKenzie of TSN expended 2,500 words on it last month, and barely scratched the surface.

My personal favourite was the one suggested some weeks ago by Sportsnet's John Shannon, which he called NHL 3.0 (three divisions, zero chance of being approved.) What I like about it is that it recognizes that Winnipeg and Dallas are just damned inconveniently located, and spreads the travel out a little more equitably.

Shannon's brainchild?

Gretzky Division: Winnipeg, Minnesota, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Colorado, Phoenix, Anaheim, L.A., San Jose.

Lemieux Division: Philadelphia, Washington, Carolina, Nashville, Florida, Tampa, N.Y. Rangers, N.Y. Islanders, New Jersey, Dallas.

Orr Division: Boston, Buffalo, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis.

Play four games against each team in your own division, home-and-home with the other divisions, and you get 76 games. And get to honour three legends without inventing more trophies.

His plan has a couple of flaws. Letting 20 teams into the playoffs - the top four from each division and eight wild cards, with a short wild-card series to bring the post-season field down to a manageable 16 - is too unwieldy.

The time saved by reducing the season to 76 games would be added on with an extra playoff round. Gong.

But the division plan is good. I would make just one change to it, flipping Dallas into the Orr and Pittsburgh into the Lemieux.

That would put Dallas with other central time zone teams Chicago and St. Louis, and keep the Pennsylvania teams together. And after all, Lemieux was a Penguin.

The Pennsylvania Quandary is the major sticking point in the CBC/Elliotte Friedman fourdivision proposal - which commissioner Gary Bettman is said to be pushing - that aired on Hockey Night last Saturday.

It had the East divided as follows:

LEMIEUX: Philadelphia, Washington, N.Y. Rangers, N.Y. Islanders, New Jersey, Carolina, Tampa Bay, Florida.

ORR: Columbus/Detroit, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Ottawa.

And in the West: GRETZKY: Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, L.A., San Jose, Anaheim, Colorado, Phoenix.

HOWE: Detroit/Columbus, Winnipeg, Chicago, Dallas, Nashville, St. Louis, Minnesota.

The easy fix here, if Pittsburgh and Philly are determined to torpedo the deal, is to flip Pittsburgh and Carolina, and to reason with the Red Wings, whose complaint about the travel associated with being in the West is essentially nullified by the four-division format.

If the schedule calls for homeand-home against every outof-division opponent - and the first two rounds of playoffs are within the division - everyone gets a little travel agony, and Detroit's is no better or worse than the average Western team.

The glaring shortcoming of the four-division geographical plan is that in a 30-team league, two divisions necessarily have eight teams and two have seven, meaning the odds of finishing in the top four and making the playoffs are worse for, say, a California team or a western Canadian team or a New York-area team or a Pennsylvania team than for an eastern Canadian team.

But in either conference, Detroit gets the easier path.

The unbalanced divisions are where it starts to get untidy, though.

Talk of crossover playoffs to address divisional inequities, as in the Canadian Football League, with one-game playoffs to see who gets into the post-season - it looks incredibly complicated, but curiously enough, such ideas have added to the late-season drama in both the CFL and Major League Baseball.

A couple of proposals that definitely won't float: an all-Canadian division (too much travel), or any division format that has just one or two American teams in a cluster of Canadian clubs.

The reverse isn't ideal, either - Winnipeg, for instance, the lone Canadian entry in the Howe grouping - but the Jets are pretty much happy to be anywhere that isn't called Southeast.

If all this falls into your "wake me when they decide" category, good for you. It means you are a student of history - we're in Year 13 of the current configuration, and the longest the NHL has gone without a major re-tooling since expansion in 1967 is 12 years.

Also, it shows a healthy perspective on rivalries, which are not everlasting.

Outside of some Original Six tong wars like Montreal-Boston, Habs-Leafs and Detroit-Chicago, rivalries tend to be the products of recent playoff meetings - though Ottawa-Toronto has redefined "recent" - and those combinations form and reform all the time.

Still, you can tell it's going to be a test of Bettman's clout to see if he can assemble the required 20 votes to push through any realignment plan, even his own, when getting a two-thirds majority of governors to agree that it gets dark at night is a challenge.

The commissioner has proved he can rally the owners in sufficient numbers to back him in a war with the players. But that was easy: it was about making the rich richer.

This is owners versus owners, and it's all about self-interest. It will be another glimpse into how good Bettman is at the backroom game.

Unless it's sunny out. Then all bets are off.

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