Five years ago today, professional indoor lacrosse took a sharp turn which easily could have been its undoing.

It turned out to be perhaps its best moment.

On 21 July 1997, following lengthy negotiations, the decade-old Major Indoor Lacrosse League merged with a new entry, the National Lacrosse League. The combined league was essentially the old MILL, but featuring two important changes -- franchises had been added in Syracuse and Hamilton, and each team now had its own owner instead of all teams being owned by the same group.

The exact causes of this merger remain murky, and may never be fully known. Part of the trouble came when Howard Dolgon, owner of the American Hockey League's Syracuse Crunch, tried to bring a MILL team to Onondaga County. Unsatisified with the terms MILL co-owners Chris Fritz, Russ Cline and Bruce Lucker offered, Dolgon found himself allied with fellow AHL owners Steve Donner (Rochester) and Frank DuRoss (Providence) in creating the rival NLL.

Dolgon, Donner, and DuRoss won the battle, but found new struggles ahead which started to set the tone for the new era of professional lacrosse.

DuRoss' franchise, the Boston Blazers, crashed before he could ever get it off the ground. After nine years as a solid member of MILL, the Blazers suspended operations before the 1998 season and haven't been seen since.

Dolgon discovered that Syracuse was cool to the notion of professional lacrosse, especially at the prices he set and the poor results from the team. The Smash went 2-10 its first year, and hadn't won a road game until well into its fourth season, by which time it had been sold and moved to Ottawa.

Only Donner could keep his franchise alive and well, although he has hit one bump along the way. He inherited the defending MILL champion, but while the Knighthawks have qualified for the playoffs every year since, they still haven't snagged a second title.

As for Cline, Fritz, and Lucker, they each took a team of their own, albeit in name only. Cline's Philadelphia Wings, Fritz's Ontario Raiders and Lucker's New York Saints were all actually owned and operated by the Major Indoor Lacrosse Group, remnants of their fallen league. After one year, the Ontario team had been unloaded, with the New York club to follow a year later. Today, Lucker has left the operation, while Cline and Fritz (now joined by former player Mike French) continue to own the immensely successful Wings.

On the fifth anniversary of the league's "founding," it's only fair to take a few moments to consider the events since then which have shaped the league into what it is today and are helping it get to where management would like it to be.

Granted, not everything has been positive. Franchises have moved, three times in one case. One (Boston) folded, with another (Montreal) possibly down the drain as soon as this coming week. Opportunities to promote the league have been lost. The league, at times, has wandered aimlessly.

Needless to say, though, more than a few things have gone right, and even those that fans vehemently disagree with have turned out all right. So here, in chronological order, are the five events of the past half-decade which have defined the league as it currently exists, as this writer sees it.

1998: Bill Watters purchases the Ontario Raiders
Although it's easy to deny this now, many fans four years ago felt that the Raiders couldn't quite reach the level of the elite teams in the league with the players they had at the time. Yes, the all-Canadian squad blew four games in the high-stakes sudden death with which many were unaccustomed (most of coach Les Bartley's players were new to the league or had very little experience in MILL, having only played in the Canadian summer leagues, where overtime periods run to completion), but they still finished a mediocre 6-6, not even qualifying for the playoffs. It didn't help matters that the Raiders were drawing weakly at giant Copps Coliseum.

Enter Bill Watters, Toronto Maple Leafs executive. Seeing the league's potential in a boxla hotbed such as southern Ontario, he led a group of investors in purchasing the Raiders and moving them north to Maple Leaf Gardens. However, Watters' group didn't stop there, vigorously promoting the team in Toronto and financing telecasts of Rock games across Canada. Rooting for the Rock suddenly became popular, with the hip broadcasts on Sportsnet and the wildly successful team on the floor (the 1999 Rock went undefeated at home on its way to a league title; the following year, it lost on home turf just once, and repeated as champs).

Toronto's fantastic results translated into a second Canadian team by 2001, the Ottawa Rebel. A year later, three more -- Calgary, Vancouver, and Montreal -- joined the league, with several other cities looking to join. While the United States remains a struggle for the NLL, indoor lacrosse is safely established in Canada.

2000: Jim Jennings hired as commissioner
Only two men have held the league's highest job. The first, John Livsey, captained a ship which had no direction and ultimately got nowhere, partly due to his own faults and partly due to the owners apparently having no common long-term goals.

The second to hold the position, Jim Jennings, quickly established his mark on the office, appointing a deputy commissioner and a licensing czar and beefing up the public relations department. His goals: "Increase league revenues, promote franchise expansion and establish recognition of the NLL as the fifth major league."

Although his second year on the job has been much slower, in part due to the weakened economy, Jennings had an action-packed first twelve months on the job, headlined by a massive expansion plan which brought four new teams into the league. Jennings also led negotiations to resurrect the national game-of-the-week telecast in the United States (now on CNN/SI) and introduce it in Canada (on Sportsnet), and earned accolades for his promotional skill. He has his hands full this summer, though, initiating a new round of expansion for the 2004 season, landing a new TV contract now that CNN/SI has stopped broadcasting, and trying to keep the Montreal Express from folding or suspending operations.

2000: Cross-involvement returns when Watters leads Ottawa group
With the Syracuse Smash all but destined to fold, Brad Watters -- son of the Rock owner -- swooped in with a group of buyers of his own to purchase the team and move it to Ottawa. Watters, however, was already running the day-to-day operations of his father's team, a development which left many fans nervous. Once Fritz and Cline got totally behind the Wings, no one had been holding a stake in more than one NLL team, nor were very many interested in allowing it to happen again. When forced to choose between letting the Smash die and allowing the Watters family to try saving another troubled team, team owners opted for the latter of the two. However, strict rules were put in place to prevent the teams from conspiring to help each other.

Those rules found further use in a year's time, when the younger Watters assembled yet another team of investors and brought a franchise to Montreal. Originally destined to purchase and relocate the failing Columbus Landsharks (owned by none other than John Livsey), the Montreal group -- for which Watters is an advisor and not an investor -- ended up with an expansion franchise in a complicated deal to keep a team in Columbus. So, who were the new owners of the Landsharks? Mike Gongas and Charlie Russo, who already were running the New York Saints.

2001: Western expansion begins
No MILL franchise was ever located west of Detroit, and even there, the Turbos had stopped playing in 1994. At the time of the merger, NLL franchises were still all located in the northeastern United States, aside from the Hamilton franchise, just an hour into eastern Canada. By the 2001 season, the league had spread only as far as Columbus. Jennings was eager to change that, knowing that the only way to be treated as a major league was to be in major cities across both the United States and Canada. Expansion entries from Calgary and Vancouver, located clear across the continent from the rest of the league, quickly crossed the commissioner's desk and onto the Board of Governors' agenda. The board approved them both, and the Roughnecks and Ravens came on board in the spring. This summer, owners called off any expansion for the 2003 season, which scuttled attempts to welcome Los Angeles, Portland, and/or San Jose to the league. Some, if not all three, will eventually be added. However, in the lone relocation of the offseason, NLL took a giant step when the Washington Power was sold and moved to Denver, over a thousand miles west of Columbus. The sale carries a second importance...

2002: Kroenke Sports purchases Washington Power
It's way too soon to tell if E. Stanley Kroenke can make a success out of the former Power, the most transient team in league history (three moves since 1999). However, his arrival marks a tremendous first for the league. Unlike any other team owner in the league, Kroenke is a true sports mogul. Yes, Brad Watters has built himself a mini-empire from scratch, Steve Donner has a hand in most of Rochester's pro sports teams, and Jayson Williams (New Jersey Storm) is loaded with cash from his time as a professional basketball player, but the new kid on the block owns two major league franchises (the NHL's Colorado Avalanche and NBA's Denver Nuggets), a stake in another team (Arena football's Colorado Crush), and the arena in which his teams play (Pepsi Center). It's a cross-promotional dream come true for the NLL, and if Kroenke succeeds with his still-unnamed team, we might find the league's ownership ranks swelling with more big-city sports moguls.