Remember when a tie cost five bucks? Yep, once upon a time you didn’t mind seeing the Bruins play the Canadiens to a deadlock because all it cost was a roll of dimes. Nowadays, that same kiss from your sister runs as much as $100 per seat.

This expensive fact of today's NHL leads to a simple question: Why would anyone want to pay that kind of money to witness a professional sporting event in which no one wins? That's not the only problem: With four columns for win, loss, tie and overtime loss, the NHL standings are virtually unreadable. And one other thing. The "loser" doesn’t really lose. "What I don’t like," says veteran Devils D Scott Stevens, "is to see teams get a point for an overtime loss."

Stevens, like many NHL traditionalists (and dads on Father's Day), can accept an occasional ugly tie. "The fans get an extra five minutes of hockey," Stevens says. "And the 4-on-4 is pretty exciting."

True enough, but it can still leave fans walking home with that "so what?" feeling. Last season, 274 of the league's 1,230 games -- nearly a quarter -- went to OT. Of those, just 122 were decided. This season, through Dec. 3, a similar pattern is developing with just 47% of regulation ties broken in OT. In a sport that needs to attract new fans, that's not good enough.

The NHL game is too exciting to end with an anticlimax. At long last, let's unknot the tie.

We asked our ESPN.com readers to come up with tiebreaking solutions. But our solution is the shootout. Write this down, Mr. Bettman: If a game is knotted after regulation, five shooters from each team take turns firing penalty shots at the opposing goaltender. Still tied after five shots? Continue in a sudden-death shootout until you have a winner. The victor claims two points and the loser gets what a loser should get -- nothing.

The shootout is quick, dramatic and decisive. Can you imagine making a beer run while Brendan Shanahan is challenging Patrick Roy? Matchups like that will make for more prime-time NHL highlights.

Don’t worry -- playoff games will still get decided the old-fashioned way, in sudden-death play. But it's time to bring some more life to those high-priced regular-season games.

Deep down, nobody really likes an ugly tie.

This article appears in the December 24 issue of ESPN The Magazine.