As someone who has taken exactly one vacation that was purely about relaxation (a beach trip to Puerto Rico about 15 years ago) compared to dozens that had more of the feeling of a sprint than a chance to catch my breath, I can appreciate the NHL's approach to its calendar.

If you are going to pause your regularly scheduled programming for two weeks for some sort of alternate format, you might as well make it count.

If you are going to insist that during this pause only your very best players will be required to work — an odd feature of All-Star "breaks" in all leagues, allowing the grinders and glue guys to get away from it all but not the faces of the sport — the best way to ensure it is a hit with fans is to turn the event into the equivalent of getting shot out of a cannon into a volcano.

Congratulations, then, to the NHL and the 4 Nations Face-Off, which concluded Thursday with a thrilling 3-2 overtime win for Canada over the United States — something I talked about on Friday's "Daily Delivery" podcast.

The competition between those two countries as well as Finland and Sweden was top-notch and served as an enticing appetizer to the Winter Olympics a year from now.

The rivalry between the U.S. and Canada was fierce, punctuated by fisticuffs in the U.S. win earlier in the tournament and 110% effort in the championship game.

Wild fans (and players) reveled in the performances of Matt Boldy and Brock Faber, among others.

The whole thing was an invention, but a good one. The biggest questions afterward from fans were, "How did Connor McDavid get so open in the slot on the overtime winner?" and "How can we make sure they do this again?"

The high-level competition and play had the good fortune, too, of being placed adjacent to the slop offered up during the NBA's break.

The format for that was so convoluted that a week later, I'm still trying to figure it out. I couldn't tell you who won, but I can tell you that the whole thing was contrived, barely even semi-serious nonsense.

It was a beach vacation on a basketball court. And one of the greatest players of all-time, LeBron James, skipped playing because of a bogus injury and then miraculously healed in time to play 74 combined minutes of a Wednesday-Thursday back-to-back.

Some of you prefer a beach vacation, and that's fine. But nobody wants to watch tremendous players go at 75% speed and/or have so little invested in the game that they would rather just not play.

So hopefully the leagues have learned a little something in the past couple weeks: Either you go all-out like NHL players did, battling through injuries while playing for real pride. Or you send everyone home for a week and stop pretending that the tricks and gimmicks make things interesting.

Fans want to watch the best players playing their best, or they don't want to see them at all. It's not hard.