Duck Fans Can’t Wait to Get Quacking : Fans: O.C.’s die-hards, who have had little to cheer about lately, can’t wait to get back in Pond.

Victoria Caruso, an advertising account executive and Mighty Duck fan extraordinaire, was dying to hear the news, and at 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, her beeper went off.

The numerical message was 1-1-1, and Caruso knew instantly that the National Hockey League labor dispute must be over. The secret-coded page from her father meant she and the Ducks’ other eager fans should finally get to see the wildly popular Anaheim team start its second season.

Caruso had been glued to news reports for days, but as the umpteenth and final final deadline in the owners’ lockout approached, she was sitting edgily in a room with a client’s sales staff. She had given her father, Michael Caruso of Tustin, explicit instructions.

“The code for no season was 2-2-2,” said Caruso, 27, a Huntington Beach resident who is such a fervent fan that she faxed settlement pleas to NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. “I planned the code even better, 3-3-3, in case there was a postponement of the decision. I had all the bases covered. As soon as I knew, I got all excited, and at the first break I went out and told my fellow hockey fans, ‘We’re on!’ ”

The last days before the resolution were an agonizing wait for many fans, though the Duck players themselves calmly practiced on their own Tuesday as one deadline passed, probably knowing the negotiations were likely to drag on.

Pat Chiasson of Hemet, whose family shares season tickets with a group of three others, spent Tuesday in the midst of a harried business trip, and fog delays after he boarded his plane home left him stranded on board, far from ESPN or CNN reports.

“I was stuck on a runway in Evansville (Ind.) for seven hours yesterday,” said Chiasson, a purchasing manager for a company that makes power supplies for computers. “I kept asking people on the plane, ‘Anyone hear about the hockey thing?’ No one had.”

That raises a question. How many people really care about hockey? Only 15 months ago, it was being hailed as the sport of the ‘90s, but by the first days of 1995 the league had come perilously close to being the first major sports league to cancel an entire season because of a labor dispute.

“I think a lot of people felt it was kind of going the way of baseball,” Chiasson said. “When it first happened in October, everyone was chomping at the bit, wanting it to get resolved. As time went by, we put it on the back burner for the holidays.

“There was a lot of time when they weren’t even talking. I think a lot of people were fed up. Starting with baseball, then hockey, all these hang-ups in sports in general.”

No matter. Chiasson and his wife, Patty, expect to be back in the stands, along with their two young children.

“Spencer, our 3-year-old, he kept asking me: ‘Dad, I want to go to The Pond. When can we go to The Pond?’ I told him, ‘It hasn’t been up to us.’ I guess now he’s going to get his way. He’s going to get to go. I kept telling him, soon, it was going to come soon. I was stalling.”

Tony Tavares, president of Disney Sports Enterprises, always believed his team’s fans would come back.

Doug Willits of Orange, an electronics distributor who shares a luxury suite leased by Tycom Corp. of Irvine, also expects the sellout crowds of 17,174 to return.

“You know what? I think the fans are going to forget about it, and be so happy to have hockey that we’re going to fill the place again,” Willits said. “Even with all the unrest in professional sports, I think the fans have short memories. I think it’s disgraceful--but we’ve already renewed our Angels’ season tickets. I think the fans will be back from the first faceoff.”

Duck Coach Ron Wilson has the task of getting the players ready for that first faceoff, and they’ll have to substitute muscle for finesse at first.

“It’s going to be great for coaches and fans,” Wilson said at The Pond on Wednesday. “These games should set an all-time high for hitting. You’re going to see playoff-intensity hockey for 48 games.”

Fans and team personnel aren’t the only people celebrating the return of hockey.

Across the street from The Pond on Katella Avenue, the National Skate Locker sporting goods store saw sales of custom NHL jerseys plunge from about 150 a month last season to perhaps 10 a month during the lockout. Now, Bruce Surdin, the store’s president, expects sales of the authentic $100-plus jerseys to take off again.

“Are you kidding? We’re thrilled,” Surdin said. “I truthfully believe it’s going to go back up. I’m not sure the fan base will come back as big as it was, but with the excitement of the sport, people will want to watch it, especially with football on the way out, and face it, basketball’s like watching grass grow.

“Selling 150 a month, part of that was the excitement of the first season, but I think eventually we’ll get it back. It will probably take this whole season, but with the way it will be structured, the Ducks will have a good shot at the playoffs. And if they make the playoffs, the excitement will be back.”

There may be no other business with more to gain than The Catch restaurant on State College Boulevard, across from Anaheim Stadium. The Pond’s inadequate on-site parking leads many fans to park elsewhere, and The Catch shuttles about 350 fans from its parking lot to the arena and back every game. Many of them stop for a drink or a meal.

“This means my children are going to have a much better Christmas next year than they did this year,” managing partner Don Myers said. “This restaurant before and after hockey games is like New Year’s Eve everywhere else. Most of the players come in after the hockey game and we feed them. I wouldn’t say we lived and died with the Ducks, but with the Angels canceling 21 games and the Rams doing as poorly as they have, one of the great bright spots has been the Mighty Ducks.”

Myers expects business at The Catch to jump as much as 25%, and says not having NHL games might have cost some of his bartenders and cocktail waitresses several thousand dollars since Oct. 1, when the season was supposed to have begun.

“We’ve been on pins and needles,” he said. “The players come in here all the time, even while this was going on. It’s been a emotional thing for us. We are elated, to say the least, that they finally solved it.”