[Ryan Lambert is covering the NCAA hockey tournament for Puck Daddy; What We Learned returns next week.]

When does an NHL player have to “answer the bell” and fight to atone for his sins?

If he takes liberties with a goalie, like when Milan Lucic freight-trained Ryan Miller? Sure. If he takes out a player with a hit that crossed the line of illegality, and you don’t believe the NHL’s punishment fit that crime? OK, fine, that’ll work.

But the idea that a player should have to fight after a clean hit has been an asinine suggestion, now or in any era. It’s actually depressing, as a fight enthusiast, to witness that Pavlovian reaction in which a hitter gets jumped for having the nerve to combine timing, velocity and his opponent’s vulnerability into a massive, injurious check.

We beg for players to play the game right, to deliver hits that are clean. And then, because the player on the receiving end has name recognition, their reward is accepting fists to the face. Do your job right, do it well, do it within the confines of legality; and then because someone disagreed with the outcome, get punched in the face for it.

The hell?

On Sunday night, Brooks Orpik of the Pittsburgh Penguins delivered a clean hit on a player with name recognition: Jonathan Toews of the Chicago Blackhawks.

Toews tried to play the puck on the forecheck; Orpik zoomed in and demolished him with a check to the shoulder that sent Toews into the boards, injuring his shoulder. Orpik exploded into the hit, his skates leaving the ice after impact.

It was a hellacious check by one of the NHL’s best hitters, injuring one of the NHL’s best players. Was it headhunting? No. Was it a defender taking liberties with an opponent? No, unless we’ve redefined any hard check in the game as “borderline.”

As Toews’ teammate Marian Hossa said after the Blackhawks’ loss, "I know him as a fair guy. Obviously, some calls are tougher than others, and sometimes he’s on the borderline."

Hossa’s a thoughtful, fair-minded observer of the game. Which is, of course, everything that Mike Milbury isn’t.

Here’s Mad Mike on NBCSN, saying what you expected him to say about Orpik:

(An aside: While Milbury and Jeremy Roenick are adept at stirring the pot, sometimes with antiquated views, hasn’t hockey coverage on NBCSN reached a point of maturity where we can have a segment or two that isn’t BIG NARRATIVE and instead breaks down the nuances of the game or “hot stove” news? I suggest this without a shred of sarcasm: Wouldn’t our hockey viewing lives be more enriched by shifting Pierre McGuire from the benches to the intermission show?)

"You have a guy who operates on a predatory level, that's Brooks Orpik, but he refuses to fight. He refuses to face the music when it comes to that and the physicality. He makes a conscious choice. He's allowed to do that in this game; you don't have to fight. You can turtle. We've seen that. There's a history of what happens to Brooks Orpik when somebody challenges him, and that happened in Boston.”

(Another aside: "Predatory" is a word Milbury learned when Shanahan used it to suspend Brad Marchand for a hit that Milbury oddly used to impugn Evgeni Malkin later that season. And while we'd never suggest that a professional commentator has it in for one franchise over another, Milbury sure does have a thing for the Penguins, even after Matt Cooke left.)

Milbury’s Boston reference is, of course, about the incident earlier this season when Shawn Thornton of the Boston Bruins assaulted Orpik for a clean hit on Loui Eriksson. Orpik refused to fight, so Thornton slew-footed him, pounded him in the face while Orpik was on the ice and before he was stretchered off. Thornton received a 15-game suspension for his expert enforcement.

Look, Milbury’s one of the hockey media’s leading Neanderthals, even if he’s come around on hits to the head ever since a Bruin’s career ended because of one. (At the hands of a Penguin, no less.)

But he’s just the one that gets to be on TV; there are many others that see Orpik delivering a clean hit and believe he should suffer for it.

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