The last time the NFL lost games to a strike, nobody had ever heard of fantasy football. The year was 1987, and the main issues were, in no particular order, free agency and whether cheerleaders should wear legwarmers.

Since then, baseball canceled a World Series, the NHL canceled an entire season (what, you didn't notice?) and the NBA lost a big chunk of a season.

Is the NFL era of labor peace about to end? There are many reasons to wonder: The economy is sinking, yet a few teams are doling out record amounts of money anyway. The league is looking at a 2010 season with no salary cap if no deal is struck before then. And the two sides — ownership and union leadership — are already sniping at each other.

What happens next year at this time, if the NFL is really heading to an uncapped year? Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, for all his on-field failings, has turned his team into a revenue machine, and he is obviously happy to spend his money on players, no matter what the market is. Will he really keep his hand in his pocket? For that matter, what will Cowboys owner Jerry Jones do if his new Jerry World Stadium brings in as much money as he hopes?

I'm not saying this will get ugly. I'm saying it's already ugly; the only question is how ugly it gets. The players' union has said, in no uncertain terms, that once you go no-cap, you never go back. The union also recently issued a report that said teams averaged nearly $25 million in profit last year, so what's the problem?

Commissioner Roger Goodell's response?

"There's a lot of fiction in that report," Goodell said in his annual State of the League address during Super Bowl week. "The $24 million in profits is completely inaccurate. We understand our numbers. Ownership has spent a lot of time evaluating the current C.B.A. and determined it is better to terminate that agreement and come up with a new one that will be beneficial to the clubs and players. The economy turning sour has accentuated the importance of the C.B.A."

Is Goodell posturing? Maybe. When collective bargaining agreements are about to expire, a commissioner's best friends are Gloom and Doom. (This comes easier to the NHL's Gary Bettmann, who could suck the fun out of a Stanley Cup celebration — and has.)

But this feels different. For one, most of the labor peace was orchestrated by former commissioner Paul Tagliabue and former union leader Gene Upshaw. Tagliabue is retired. Upshaw died suddenly last year, and he still hasn't been replaced.

Goodell is no rookie; he worked under Tagliabue for years. But it's different when you're the commissioner. And until the players' union resolves its tussle for Upshaw's replacement — former players Troy Vincent and Trace Armstrong and lawyer DeMaurice Smith are the finalists to replace him — uncertainty will loom.

For many years, the NFL achieved financial and competitive parity. There were two reasons for this: the league split its national broadcast revenue evenly among all its teams, and true free agency did not hit the league until the early 1990s, almost two decades after it hit baseball.

Now we have teams (OK, team) throwing $100 million at players (OK, player). And teams have found ways to pull cash out of their stadiums in ways nobody imagined 25 years ago, from luxury suites to public-seat licenses to sponsorship deals. And with the economy in turmoil, there is a real chance that some NFL owners will take a harder look at their teams as business entities, as opposed to expensive hobbies. That could make them more hawkish.

When the union struck in 1987, the NFL was the nation's most popular league. It has become so much bigger since then. Sometimes I wonder what the country would do without its NFL Sundays, even for a few weeks. We are inching closer to finding out.