When a hockey game gets particularly rough, the announcers often start mentioning “old time hockey”. Interestingly, an editorial in the Boston Globe talks about the need to allow the game to get rough again:
It’s about passion and hate and rivalry and playing the game with a legitimate, even frightening, fervor that once made the game percolate like no other professional, unscripted sport in North America. It is a sport capable of reaching into its fans’ stomachs, twisting our innards until it hurts, and maintaining that claw-hold over the course of a fan’s lifetime, and across generations.
Hat tip to Scott Morris