It has been called the best building in professional hockey.

It soon may be called a white elephant.

The Corel Centre -- once known as the Palladium -- sits on what was once a cornfield in the outer reaches of Kanata, itself on the outer reaches of Ottawa.

When they opened the doors seven years ago this month, it was surrounded by fields and bush as far as the eye can see. Today, there is development as far as the eye can take.

No one knows exactly what will come of the bankruptcy proceedings by the Ottawa Senators. One possibility is that someone -- perhaps even a local group, perhaps even former majority owner Rod Bryden -- will stitch together the mess and continue on with the best team in hockey playing out of the Corel Centre. But it is also possible that someone will take the team elsewhere, leaving the building standing in what might be more profitable as a cornfield.

"A new building will solve everything," they said here, just as they said in so many North American cities during the 1990s.

A new building would provide more seats, higher prices for seats and luxury boxes to bring in the corporate dollar. New revenue streams would flow, no one else would be dipping in for a share -- and the fans could be counted on to turn the tap in one direction forever.

It used to be said, "If you build it, they will come."

Now they say, "If you build it, they will come -- for a while."

The idea that the building could be a main draw dates from 1965, when the $32-million, air-conditioned Astrodome opened in Houston -- and forever changed the face of professional sports.

The Astrodome was the dream of Judge Roy Hofheinz, Lyndon Johnson's cigar-chomping former campaign manager, who said he came up with the idea for a luxury stadium with corporate boxes on a trip to Rome where he had toured the Colosseum.

"I found out that the emperor and all the bigwigs sat at the top of the stadium," he said.

It wasn't true, but didn't matter: Hofheinz had invented the Skybox.

"It was done," Fred Hofheinz, the judge's son, said years later, "to attract people who used baseball games as a backdrop for their products."

Hofheinz then further changed the sporting world by getting local taxpayers to pay almost every cent of construction.

By the 1990s, it had become the accepted way of doing business. Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist has calculated that, since 1990, the four major sports have built or are in the process of building 72 stadiums and rinks at a cost of $19.4-billion (U.S.) -- some two-thirds covered by the public purse.

Finally, American cities are questioning the wisdom of this. In Canada -- after the Montreal Olympic Stadium and the Toronto SkyDome -- taxpayers have been suspicious much longer.

Ottawa, they said, would be different. Taxpayers would not be the key; real estate would.

The rink would anchor a massive real-estate deal involving 600 acres of farmland at the far reaches of the city. Three young men -- Bruce Firestone, Randy Sexton and Cyril Leeder -- calling themselves Terrace Investments -- put together an elaborate 800-page plan that had the NHL board of governors drooling when they arrived in 1991 to check out the Ottawa bid.

There is, the young men argued, "a natural relationship between hockey and real estate."

A new city called "West Terrace" would eventually rise. The rink would seat 22,500, would feature a hotel, and shops and businesses would race to locate nearby.

"Real estate," the bid said, "is what we know best, and it is the real-estate element of our bid that will allow us to pay the National Hockey League's asking price for an expansion franchise of $50-million, build a world-class sports facility and at the same time make money for Terrace and the Ottawa Senators."

By 1997, they predicted, the value of the investment would reach $400-million.

By 2003, that figure was roughly the accumulated debt. What they failed to predict was the recession, losing the project to new partners, provincial rulings that would lop off the hotel, shrink the seats and charge them for a highway turnoff -- and an ever-rising debt load from this new building that would eventually crush them.

The irony that must surely strike those who were there at the beginning is that the real-estate boom did indeed come -- but all around the designated area and with little, if any, benefit to the franchise.

No one can say that the story of Ottawa is applicable everywhere in professional hockey, but there is one significant feature that occurs in most of the cities where it is being said hockey no longer makes financial sense: Ottawa, Montreal, Buffalo, Nashville, Atlanta, South Florida, Tampa Bay, Anaheim. . . .

They all play out of new buildings.

Which have, it turns out, not solved everything.
rmacgregor@globeandmail.ca