First Things First: Congratulations Bruins!!

Well done, Bruins!

Let us begin with the macro, and proceed to the micro.

To attain preeminence in his sport, no professional athlete pays a greater price in blood, sweat, and tears than does a member of the winning Stanley Cup team.

None is required to exhibit such a combination of mental and physical toughness, upper and lower body athleticism, pain tolerance, and team play through such a prolonged regular and post-season schedule.

One can find professional baseball, basketball, and soccer players who have the heart of warriors. But these are not "helmeted sports", and the requirement of sustained, violent, physical contact is simply not integral to them. Professional lacrosse is a helmeted sport, but in its infancy. Professional football players are warriors, but the regular NFL season is only sixteen (16) games long, the playoffs around four (4) games, players have a week to recover between games, and the actual time spent running a play on the field is always a small fraction - around eleven (11) minutes - of the sixty (60)-minute game.

By contrast, the Stanley Cup Champion must endure an eighty-two (82)-game regular season schedule of sixty (60)-minute games in which the play is continuous and the shifts are generally intense. There then follows the even more amped-up playoffs, where, to prevail as the Bruins did, a team must triumph in four (4) consecutive best of seven (7) series over opponents who are themselves leaving it all on the ice.

Simply put, the NHL season and playoffs are like the Bataan Death March on ice, and by the end of it everyone is playing hurt, giving new meaning to Vince Lombardi's admonition: "You play with the little hurts."

There are great people in all sports, but in my experience professional hockey players are the lowest paid, least spoiled, most humble, toughest, and by far the most approachable of all professional athletes. They also spend the most time (if not the most dollars - the easiest thing is to write a check) in charitable work. Why? One reason may be that the ethos of the NHL is still rural Canada: simple, honest, tough, hard-working, and true.

Shouldn't this great assembly of real warriors have someone other than Commissioner Gary Bettman to preside over them?

Now to the micro:

History was certainly made.

And the history of this fabulous championship series between Boston and Vancouver will record that the blind-side hit to the head by Rome on Horton early in period #1 of Game 3 in Boston was the turning point. (And to you defenders of the indefensible: don't give me that nonsense about Horton having his head down (he didn't; even if he had, that is no defense to a blind-side head shot - read Rule 48).

This incident galvanized the Bruins. It gave them an important emotional focal point. Equally important, it deflated and took the edge off many of the good guys on the Vancouver team (they are not all cheap shot artists like Lapierre, Torres, Burrows, and Hansen) who could not have felt good about what Rome did. Also, the subsequent, eminently justified suspension of Rome hurt a team whose ranks of defensemen were already thin.

Lastly, history will also record that at a time when (i) arguably the #1 player in the game (Crosby) was sidelined (since January 5th) with a concussive head injury, (ii) more and more elite players are seeing their careers ended or foreshortened by these types of injuries, and (iii) the long and short-term damage from concussions is understood even by the NFL, the lightly-equipped gentlemen who run the NHL (Bettman, Murphy, et al.) still don't get it.

Example: in meting out the four (4)-game suspension to Rome for his indefensible hit to the head on Horton, the NHL nabobs (the same people who days earlier had claimed that there was no conclusive evidence that Burrows had bitten Bergeron!) based their decision solely on two factors: the lateness of the hit and the severity of Horton’s injury. They spoke about not leaving your feet vs. leaving your feet, about elbows vs. shoulders, about north-south vs. east-west hits (and northeast vs. southwest, and southeast vs. northwest checks), but they totally ignored the real problem: it's the head, stupid!

Simply put, the NHL needs the same policy regarding hits to the head as it has regarding hits from behind: zero tolerance. Be not afraid, NHL. The eradication of head-hunting will enhance, not diminish, the raw beauty of this great game. And the remedy is not complicated. The mechanism for enforcement already exists in Rule 48, that outlaws blind-side hits to the head. It need only be amended over the summer to outlaw ALL hits to the head.

And while the NHL is in the amendment mode, it should reshuffle its bumbling front office over the summer too, beginning with the feckless Gary Bettman.