Darren McCarty unloaded on the back of Claude Lemieux’s neck, hoping to crack the turtle’s shell. Every punch carried the weight of their teams’ rivalry, whose intensity was measured in broken bones and pints of blood.

A punch for Kris Draper, McCarty’s Red Wings teammate and best friend, and his mangled face courtsey of Lemieux's hit a year ago. A punch for every profane word exchanged between the teams, even between coaches. A punch for the fans going berserk at the Joe, the ones who gleefully clipped out “WANTED” posters with Lemieux’s face on them from the local newspaper.

With other players engaged in their own battles, McCarty kept wailing away. So Patrick Roy, the Colorado Avalanche goaltender, skated out with the intent of pulling McCarty off Lemieux. Brendan Shanahan of the Red Wings saw this, and saw McCarty with his back to Roy. So he broke free of his scrum with Adam Foote of the Avalanche, and took off towards Roy.

“I don’t know if Patrick saw me, but at the end he did because we both kind of jumped. It was a WWF move,” Shanahan recalled in Adrian Dater’s definitive book on the Red Wings vs. Avalanche battles, “Blood Feud.”

As McCarty dragged Lemieux to the Red Wings’ bench – and if you needed a better indication of Lemieux’s loathsomeness, McCarty was only given a double-minor for roughing – Foote tracked down Shanahan and started pummeling him.

Mike Vernon, the Red Wings’ goalie, joined the fray to pull Foote off of him. Then Roy returned to engage with Vernon, and two tossed fists in the most infamous goalie fight in NHL history.

It was March 26, 1997. Three-hundred and one days after Lemieux plowed Draper from behind into the boards during a chaotic playoff series. It was eight days after defenseman Larry Murphy parachuted into the most intense rivalry in professional sports at that time.

“I didn’t realize until I got on the ice how intense it was. How competitive it was. It caught me by surprise – I knew there was bad blood between the teams, but I had no idea to what extent it would go to,” Murphy recalled.

“I’ve never been involved in anything that had so much spite.”

Nor will any other NHL player, going forward.

The Red Wings and the Avalanche had the last great rivalry. There can not be another.

***

One of the most remarkable things about the Red Wings vs. Avalanche rivalry was how it began.

“What impressed me was that most rivalries are based on geography and history. This one was based on a series of events that took place, and the thing just exploded,” said Murphy.

The 1996 Western Conference Finals involved the Avalanche, in their first season n Denver following relocation from Quebec, against the Red Wings, the best team in the NHL that had yet to win a Stanley Cup to validate the claim, having been embarrassingly swept by the New Jersey Devils in the 1995 Stanley Cup Final.

The series was immediately brutal. Look no further than another “WWF move,” as Slava Kozlov slammed defenseman Adam Foote’s head against the glass:

The Avalanche had long contended that the Red Wings fired the first shot in this war with plays like that, rather than the Lemieux hit on Draper.

“That’s what the media thinks started it. For us, it started earlier in the series,” said Foote. “There were hits going on … I don’t want to discuss it, but I took a bad hit in that game from Kozlov. A lot got let go during the playoffs. And the referees didn’t get a handle on it during the series.”

In fact, it was Lemieux’s retaliation for that incident – a sucker punch to Kozlov in Game 4 – that resulted in his first suspension of the series. After the game, Lemieux and his family were walking past the Red Wings team bus when coach Scotty Bowman started profanely yelling at him about the hit.

Lemieux actually came on the Red Wings bus and challenged him to a fight.

Those were the days.

Still, it was the Lemieux hit on Draper that set off the powder keg.

“I heard his face pop,” said McCarty, who was sitting on the bench in front of the incident. “That was my brother.”

Draper’s face was literally broken: His jaw and his cheek shattered, his orbital bone broken. Reconstructive surgery was needed. His jaw was wired shut. His face looked like someone tried to remake it using putty.

Lemieux was given a two-game suspension after the incident, costing him two Stanley Cup Final games. According to "Blood Feud," he actually asked NHL disciplinary Brian Burke to suspend him for half of the upcoming regular season if it went not missing games in the Final. Burke declined.

Story continues