A bloody March brawl between the New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils was the latest occasion for professional hockey's would-be reformers to bemoan the barbarism of fighting. But when it comes to pugilism and pucks, the moral high road is a slippery path to moral delusion.

Brawling in hockey isn't just a cultural vestige, the elimination of which would improve the game or even protect its players. It fills a gap that rules never can. Some fighting is absolutely necessary to ensure that hockey doesn't devolve into the Gladiator games that critics of violence already believe the sport has become.

Brandon Keim

That argument might sound strange, if not downright primitive, to those who see in hockey a last refuge for behavior nearly erased from every other major sport. In basketball, where most fights feel like an accidental escalation of trash-talk bravado, punches are rarely thrown. The few fights that happen in baseball, usually after a batter is hit by a pitch, are punished with suspensions. Even football, a sport so brutal that hundreds of former pros are probably brain-damaged, mired in a scandal over a coach who paid his players to intentionally injure others, condemns fighting.

In lantern-jawed defiance stands hockey, where a fight happens roughly every other game. Rather than being suspended or even punished, combatants are merely removed from play for five minutes afterward. As the penalties cancel each other out, the game essentially continues as if nothing bad happened. The one exception is the so-called instigator rule, which gives an extra two-minute penalty to a player thought to have started a fight against a reluctant partner – and many fans consider even that penalty excessive.

Conducted honorably, between combatants who understand that physical punishment is the consequence of unacceptable behavior, it's a relatively safe, constrained and consistent form for players to hold each other accountable.Unfortunately, the pro-fighting argument is made most vocally by people like Canadian TV personality and icon Don Cherry, hockey's crazy uncle. But to understand it, one must understand that there are different types of fights. There are staged bouts, held between ultra-specialized and freakish goons whose primary job is to ritually battle their freakish, ultra-specialized opposites on other teams. This type of fighting is indefensible. It is not, in the language of fighting's opponents, a part of the game, but rather a sideshow with little relationship to the actions of other players.

Then there are fights that arise as a consequence of play, the natural culmination of rising tempers or as retribution for dangerous actions. These organic fights are fundamentally different from staged combat, but fighting's critics usually lump them together, claiming that any fight is an unacceptable form of violence.

Let's start with the obvious: Hockey is an intrinsically violent game. Take away the fighting, and hockey is still a physical ordeal. As of this writing, no fewer than 158 National Hockey League players – slightly more than one of every five in the league – are injured. The vast majority of their injuries were not incurred in fights. Even if basic physical contact intrinsic to the sport were somehow removed, the game would remain a dangerous one, played by large, powerful and hyper-competitive men moving extremely fast in a confined space.

Now, simply because a game is unavoidably a contact sport isn’t reason enough to abandon any limits on violence. But it does mean that no bright ethical line separates the pro- and anti-fighting camps. To be a hockey fan – however pacifist – is to be complicit in paying people to risk their health and well-being for one's personal enjoyment.

Why, then, should intentional fighting be considered uniquely bad, worse than the knee-shredding collisions or eye-gouging high sticks or mouth-shattering stray pucks whose place in the game fans blithely accept?

To see two grimacing grown men throwing punches may be discomfortingly primal, but the blows do no more damage than plays considered routine and acceptable, or at least undeserving of hand-wringing denunciation. Indeed, there's a case to be made that fights provide an emotional safety valve, settling conflicts before they escalate into actions more dangerous than punches: Better to tussle and be done than worry about 220-pound men skating 20 miles per hour with vengeance on their minds.

The threat of fighting also discourages reckless or cheap play. That proposition may be difficult to prove through opinion and anecdote (though certainly Wayne Gretzky would agree) but it's clear that a decades-long decline in fighting has not made the game less vicious. If anything, hockey is more brutal than at any time in recent memory – witness the injuries, especially the now-endless parade of concussions – and demonizing fighting has become an easy escape from confronting the game's deeper problems.

The NHL's misbegotten emphasis on speed has made collisions more dangerous and unavoidable. Its salary structure has created a distinct category of young, low-salaried third- and fourth-line players who function as puck-chipping guided missiles. A common lament among hockey executives is that players simply have less respect for each other than before – and as the NHL's failed attempt to reduce head-targeting body checks by delivering more and longer suspensions to blatant transgressors has shown, the solution to these problems won't be administrative.

In that failure to reduce concussions is an important lesson. All sports are metaphors for life, and hockey more than any other embodies the limitations of law. For every head-concussing hit that's punished, another dangerous play goes unpunished or wrist-slapped, and unavoidably so: Each game contains dozens of potentially injurious moments, and if every stray high-stick or head-down was punished like it caused an injury, the game would be unwatchable. Formal justice weighs consequence more heavily than character — yet character matters.

That’s why hockey needs fighting. Conducted honorably, between combatants who understand that physical punishment is the consequence of unacceptable behavior, it's a relatively safe, constrained and consistent form for players to hold each other accountable. It's a grassroots solution for a gap that can’t ever be filled by referees or league authorities.

If that sounds a bit too Wild West, then remember that the West was tamed not only by lawmen but by individuals who knew the risks of being too aggressive and trigger-happy. What hockey needs isn't less fighting. It just needs the right kind of fighting.

Photo: New Jersey Devils' Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond, left, fights with New York Rangers' Jody Shelley during the first period of an NHL hockey game Wednesday, March 10, 2010, in Newark, N.J. (AP Photo/Bill Kostroun)