All you need to know is that Washington Capitals hockey ruffian Tom Wilson was fined $5,000 last week for sucker-punching one New York Ranger and pummeling another, while the Rangers were fined fifty times that amount for expressing outrage that Wilson wasn’t suspended.

“Terribly unfair,” National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman railed against the Rangers’ complaint. How dare the Rangers call league player safety chief George Parros “unfit to continue in his current role” just because he turned a blind eye to Wilson’s goonery?

Naturally, the incident led to the Rangers instigating eye-for-an-eye fisticuffs when the teams met again two nights later—the sort of vigilante justice forever endorsed by hockey tradition. The presence of so-called “policemen” or “enforcers”—OK, “thugs”—like Wilson has diminished in the sport over the years. But it hasn’t—and won’t—go away.

To realize that, all you need to know can be found in a 2006 book by Ross Bernstein, “The Code; the Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL.” The code, Bernstein said, is “hockey’s sacred covenant, its unwritten rules of engagement that have been handed down from generation to generation….it forces players to be accountable, to respect one another. That’s the code: Do onto others.”

There remains a conviction—oops, inappropriate word, given the slap-on-the-wrist penalties lightly meted out—that fighting belongs in hockey, even though it takes away from the sport’s excruciatingly entertaining on-the-fly drama. There somehow persists the counterintuitive belief that fighting is a self-policing mechanism that controls dirty play; that it is essential to “let off steam;” that it is a legitimate tactical device to energize teammates and fire up fans.

The tired rationale is that hockey, like all sports, is inherently risky and athletes consent to possible danger whenever they step into the competitive arena; that hockey’s kid-gloves penalties—five whole minutes in the sin bin for fighting!—are sufficient to police such matters; that society as a whole licenses a measure of injuries in heat-of-the-battle chaos.

Commissioner Bettman certainly is sold on all that bunkum. Years ago, he declared on ESPN that an outright ban on fights “is not going to happen” because “there doesn’t seem to be any appetite by anyone who has any connection to the game, most especially our fans, to do that.” Fighting, he continues to insist, is “part of the game.”

The author Bernstein said he equates “hockey fighters to kickers and punters in football; you’re not going to win without them.” But, while there have been championship teams that employed headhunting tough guys, there also have been winners that stuck to skating, passing, shooting and goaltending.

It can be argued (as it is here) that fighting is an unnecessary danger; that it’s a sideshow, a silly macho contrivance that keeps hockey a niche sport. Fighting, it should be noted, decreases during the playoffs, when losing players to the penalty box is less affordable.

Still, all you need to know is that, as Deadspin reported in a 2010 post, there was a hockey fight camp for children operating in Michigan, preparing the next generation to believe that you can’t back down. At Puckmasters, according to Deadspin, “Fight camp was held twice a year, cost $50….Players as young as 11 were welcome to attend the one-day clinic, where they learned basic fighting theory, how to throw punches, grapple, defend oneself, and the code of ethics as it pertained to helmetless, bare-knuckle fighting among children in skates.”

Once, back in 1975, a player (Boston’s Dave Forbes) was prosecuted in a U.S. court for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—his hockey stick—against Henry Boucha of the Minnesota North Stars. A hung jury got Forbes off the hook and prosecuting attorney Gary Flakne declared himself “the only attorney in history who had 20,000 witnesses to an assault and didn’t get a conviction.

“I had people saying to me, ‘God bless you, Mr. Flakne, for taking this on,’” he said. “But then I’d walk into a bar and it would be, ‘What’s the matter with you? You got nothing better to do than go after these guys?’ You get coaches and managers saying, ‘Next thing you’ll have the players wear lace panties and pink gloves.’ The macho mentality.”

For all those who considered Forbes—and, now, Wilson—a hockey Snidely Whiplash, a villain thoroughly disinterested in the spirit of fair play, there were thousands who saw him as a sainted “competitor,” willing to do absolutely anything to win. The latter, and Bettman, seem to be demanding, “You got a problem with that?”