It was supposed to be the week when American ice hockey folk looked back fondly on Lake Placid. Twenty years ago a team of young American students beat a mighty or, as we used to say, a crack, Russian team on the ice at the Winter Olympics and went on to win the gold medal days later.

The Americans had been beaten 10-3 by the same crack Russians just 13 days earlier, and even stripped of all the Cold War hokum and the heavy-handed political overtones, their win was one of the great romance stories of the era.

Twenty years. The boys of Lake Placid are men and fathers and storytellers now, and they were just clearing their throats last week getting ready to tell it all again when Marty McSorley of the Boston Bruins skated furiously up behind Donald Brashear of the Vancouver Canucks and swung his stick at Brashear's head.

Picture Joe Rabbitte being felled brutally against Roscommon a few years ago and you have some idea of the sickening impact on Brashear's head. Then try to visualise Rabbitte skating on ice when he was struck and falling backwards, rigid as a board, slamming the back of his head onto the ice as he landed. That's what Brashear did.

His head had scarcely cracked the ice when fighting broke out all round him and sportswriters began clicking the save buttons on their laptops to download the ritual denunciations of violence in sport.

We are all trigger-happy with the old piety gun. We have all witnessed stuff on the field of play "the like of which we never want to see again". Mostly it's just hypocrisy. Our positions are undermined by our ambivalence. Put us on the sidelines in charge of an Under-eight team on a Saturday and we want them hitting first, taking no nonsense, stopping the full forward any way we can.

We connive. We like hardmen. We'd rather win dirty than lose clean. Nice guys come last. We can't understand why Peadar Andrews didn't deck Ollie Murphy in last year's Leinster final. We would have done it. We have codes to distinguish good from chickens. Physical presence. A hearty appetite for full-blooded championship fare. Uncompromising.

Nothing gets our attention like a good fight, especially when we don't have to fight it ourselves. And afterwards we can claim to have been nauseated.

What McSorley did to Brashear was at the extreme edge of that syndrome. And McSorley suddenly found himself on his own. To use a vogueish phrase, we are all enablers in sporting violence. Suddenly and confusingly, we withdrew our support.

In the aftermath, McSorley, long prized and paid as a tough guy, found himself a pariah, his career virtually finished. One incident of pure violence was extracted from the hurly burly of a hockey game and isolated to be played over and over again, like Kennedy's brain exploding all those years ago in Dallas.

"I'm still in shock at what I did," McSorley said, full of genuine contrition. "I have to come to terms with what I did. There's no excuse. It was so stupid. I can't believe I did it. I got way too carried away. It was a real dumb play. I embarrassed my hockey team, I apologise to Donald Brashear and the fans who had to watch that."

There was no room for the "man's game, two sides to every story" justifications which we are used to. McSorley's friend and team captain, Ray Bourque, was in shock too.

"There's no room for that. You can't justify that. I have never witnessed anything like that. I don't know what happened there. It was a shocker, it blew me away. That's the first time I've witnessed something like that. It's not fun."

Markus Nasland of the Canucks was just as stunned. "It made me sick to my stomach. I don't have words for it. When things like that happen, you worry about life. The slash was, I think, bad enough to kill someone, and falling back . . . I'm just happy that he's okay."

These guys are worth quoting because they are hockey players, tough pros who play a fast, skilful and violent game which permits fighting as a form of selfpolicing on the ice. Yet when the game produced a genuine casualty, they winced and waited for the whip to be cracked.

Generally NHL professionals point to other pro leagues and claim that permitting outbreaks of fighting is the most honest way to deal with violence within the game. A professional code develops wherein nasty, dangerous stickwork is punished by other professionals and eventually a game settles down into its own rhythm.

It's a curious argument which on one level (the NHL's own marketing) seems unsustainable, but on another (the nature of the game) makes sense. Ice hockey is a wonderful game played with such skilful simplicity that you have to see it done badly to appreciate just how good the best players are.

Ice hockey is a fine spectator sport, yet the struggle for ratings and expansion makes ice hockey reluctant to part with the spectacle of the fight. That's what makes ice hockey an interesting case study. NHL officials speak frankly about their sport having generally found an acceptable level of violence. When they make the self-policing argument in the near future, they will for some time be confronted with the name of Marty McSorley. It's still an interesting argument though.

There is honest logic as well as marketing pragmatism to their thinking. Fast, explosive man-to-man games like ice hockey and Gaelic games and rugby are difficult if not impossible to police. Players buy space for themselves at a premium, and, if the truth be told, they don't depend on refs to keep things honest, they depend on each other.

McSorley crossed a line and deserves what he gets. Yet the discussion on fighting within sport which his crime has incited is an interesting one. Would there be fewer stamping and biting incidents in rugby if the players were given some sort of latitude to sort each other out? Would the sharp elbows and flying studs used by "canny" corner backs be less in evidence if terms were settled early on?

It's easy to denounce a Brashear incident or a Joe Rabbitte incident, to swoon in print at the sight of men fighting. It's harder to decide just what we want our games to be, where we want to draw the line between hard, physical exuberance and doing whatever it takes.