“Something like this, it’s painful for everybody,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell told reporters this afternoon, roughly 12 hours after the league and the referees’ union struck a tentative deal to end the lockout that enraged players, fans, and—after Monday night’s debacle in Seattle—pretty much the entire Internet. “We’re sorry to have to put fans through that.”
But then, sounding like someone who isn’t entirely sorry after all, added: “Sometimes you have to go through something like that in the short term for the right agreement for the long term.”
