If this were a normal winter, Stephen Walkom might have spent Tuesday night at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, working the Maple Leafs-Florida game.

Or he could have been at the Pepsi Center in Denver, where Colorado and Montreal were to play. Or GM Place in Vancouver, maintaining order between the Canucks and Boston.

But this is a winter like no other in National Hockey League history, so Walkom, an NHL referee who lives in Moon, spent that evening playing hockey, not officiating it. He is a defenseman in a recreational league.

There's no money in that, but at least he doesn't have 18,000 people screaming at him for most of the game, the way he does on a usual worknight.

Walkom, 41, is president of the NHL Officials Association, which has 67 members in the NHL and 12 more in the minors. Those in the latter group are working, just like always; the rest of Walkom's colleagues are not.

Not in their careers of choice, anyway. Officials, like so many other people who depend on the NHL for their livelihoods, are among the collateral victims of the lockout that has shut down the league since Sept. 15.

Walkom declined to say whether they are receiving any financial support from the league, but many referees and linesmen have taken temporary jobs since hockey went on hold. Some are selling cars. Others are installing kitchen cabinets. Others are teaching.

No line of work, it seems, is off-limits. Except the one for which the referees and linesmen have trained much of their lives.

No NHL official, Walkom said, has accepted work in another league and, in the process, taken jobs from the people who usually fill those positions.

Locked-out players have signed on with clubs from Alaska to Siberia, but NHL officials have put their whistles away. And not in the way critics complain they do late in the third period of tie games.

"I give credit to our guys for not going to other leagues and not taking work away from the amateur officials," Walkom said. "There's lots of work around here that probably could be done by Derek [Amell, a linesman who lives in Cranberry] and myself.

"We just know how good it felt [during the formative stages of their careers] to get a bantam game or a midget game or a junior game."

Not calling penalties or working the lines doesn't mean officials severed their ties to the sport, though. Many are playing in adult leagues, and even more are volunteering with youth teams. Walkom, for instance, has been involved with the teams on which his 10-year-old daughter (Stephanie) and 7-year-old son (Brendan) play.

"Helping coach those two teams keeps me quite busy," he said. "Certainly, it's not revenue-generating, but there's a great deal of joy to do it.

"Our guys, a lot of them have just been dads [during the lockout]. We're usually on the road 100 to 130 nights a year in a nine-month period. If there's been any silver lining in this, I'd say it's having the opportunity to be a full-time coach for your kids."

Officials are an indispensable part of any professional sport -- imagine the NHL using the honor system to enforce offside and obstruction penalties -- but are not regarded as sympathetic figures by most fans. Getting hit by an errant puck or stick is about the only chance a referee or linesman has for getting positive feedback from an NHL crowd.

Nonetheless, Walkom said members of his group have gotten some support during the lockout.

"All our neighbors and friends who understand our commitment and love for the game know we don't have that right now," he said.

Despite how his life and career have been disrupted by the lockout, Walkom seems most interested in talking about how the dispute is affecting the people who follow hockey. He noted that fans underwrite the salaries of everyone associated with the league and, in part for that reason, endorsed the rules changes the NHL plans to introduce when games resume.

"The scale of offense to defense, maybe it's sunk just a little too heavily in the favor of defense," he said.