There’s a silver lining behind every dark cloud. Turn disadvantage into advantage.

When life gives you lemonade…

That’s enough clichés about finding the positive even in the depths of despair. But in this awful economic downturn fueled by a whole host of factors, there are some positives in the world of sports.

Call it the market correction to end all market corrections.

Ticket prices are destined to go down, unless your league is the National Football League. When customers aren’t willing to fork out $50 a pop for seats so high you need an oxygen mask, prices will fall.

Just looking at the ticket prices of the major sports leagues and college teams makes one ill. Those not aware of their history know that spectator sports were intended to entertain the lower classes. Not so much anymore.

The Chicago Cubs and New York Yankees average $50 a ticket, not exactly chump change when that doesn’t include a meal, parking or gas to get there. Take a family of four and that’s one expensive trip that is reduced to a once-a-year extravagance.

Look at all of those seats last season in new Yankee Stadium behind home plate that went unsold because the Steinbrenner family charged a king’s ransom, the gross national product of Ghana, an arm and a leg and your first-born child for the mere right to behold the boys in pinstripes. The price shrank because paying customers, no matter at what discount, are always better than empty seats.

But the best savings will be for taxpayers who care nothing about sports. With local municipalities bleeding money as tax revenues decline and unfunded liabilities coming due, there is little appetite for the worst form of corporate welfare: the taxpayer-funded stadium or arena.

With free agency costs shooting through the stratosphere in all of the major professional sports, owners could no longer afford to pay for their own arenas and stadiums. Enter the government and the argument that a new stadium generates economic growth that would more than pay for the subsidy in resulting tax revenue. Also, these advocates of public stadiums argue that it will generate thousands of jobs associated with or in concert with the new facility.

According to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, $5.9 billion (that’s billion with an upper-case B, folks) was spent on sports arenas and stadiums just in the 10 years from 1989 to 1999. Most of that goes to building bigger revenue-generating stadiums with less cheap seats and more “luxury” boxes to prop up revenues to pay ever-increasing player salaries and put more money in owner’s pockets.

Owners have plenty of money, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the business of owning a sports team. So it’s natural they should fund their own facilities instead of using public funds taken from the pockets of hardworking folks.

We can’t afford to do otherwise.