You can’t blame John Scott for this.

Here’s a guy whose NHL penalty minutes-to-points ratio is 60-to-1. He spends his Saturday mornings turning to people in the lineup at the grocery store and saying “Wanna go?” He can’t help himself.

You can’t blame Sabres coach Ron Rolston for pulling the chain that releases Scott from his cage once every four games or so. Rolston is working to a Code — one that says once Corey Tropp had his skull tenderized by Jamie Devane, it’s on Buffalo to answer back.

Someone should write the Code down and put it in a cerlox binder, so that we can all watch as coaches flip through a bunch of highlighted pages, going from “Situation: Ran my goalie” to “Response: Begin lobbing tear gas into opposing bench.”

We can’t blame Dave Clarkson for jumping the boards or Phil Kessel for using his stick like a boning knife.

(We can sort of blame Ryan Miller. Because odds are if you’re blaming Ryan Miller for anything, you’re on moral ground so high you’ll need a rope ladder to get down off it.)

When we look at the mess that will not come to be known as the St. Thomas of Villanova’s Day Massacre (check your Calendar of Saints Days), we know who’s really to blame. It’s Buffalo.

Not the team. The whole city.

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We spend a lot of time in sports talking about “natural” rivalries. You know what starts a “natural” rivalry? Resource scarcity. And do you know how they resolve those sorts of rivalries? With mass murder.

There are no natural rivalries in sports, only contrived ones.

No Torontonian who has ever set foot in Montreal hates Montreal. It’s impossible. One week in Montreal, and you’ll spend the rest of your life half-seriously telling people you’re moving to Montreal some day. Then you’re going to wear a crucifix so big it’s banging against your belt buckle and dare people to say something about it.

Conversely, no Torontonian has ever set foot in Ottawa. Anyone who’s ever headed up there never returns. We’re not even sure “Ottawa” exists. Best guess? It’s a combination movie lot/gulag, where they film the longest, most boring serial in TV history and broadcast it on CPAC.

Toronto’s only natural rival is itself. This is why we spend all our time yelling at each other about things none of us really care about.

“Tell me everything you know about the Scarborough subway extension.”

“Right. Well, I’m pretty sure it runs through Scarborough and … that’s about it.”

“And are you for it or against it?”

“Against.”

“And the Leafs are thinking of …”

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“Against.”

“I haven’t told you what …”

“AGAINST!”

Toronto could suck enough juice out of its own internal rivalry to keep hydro turbines running until the sun explodes, but then there’s Buffalo.

Buffalo doesn’t like us all that much. Why? No idea. We’ve never done anything to them but spill over their borders when the dollar’s down and create the false impression that people live there.

We’ve always liked Buffalo because there’s plenty of parking and . . . that’s pretty much it. Parking.

On the sports level, they have the Bills. Which is not just a cross to bear — it’s a cross spiked with thumb tacks and layered in hot sauce. Eventually, that’ll be our cross to bear instead, and I guess they’ll be upset about that, too.

Their baseball team exists only so that Ricky Romero has a place to spend his summers, and if that bothers them let’s remember that we pay his salary. No one comes out of that deal happy.

Their hockey team exists only in notional opposition to our own. Otherwise, the Sabres have no rationale. In a logical world, they would have moved up here a decade ago so that downtown types could have another reason to complain about the suburbs (the “suburbs” being any place between Windsor and the Ontario/Quebec frontier).

But like the kid who won’t stop pinching you in the recess line, Buffalo keeps trying to start something.

“The hatred in the Sabres-Leafs rivalry reached another level tonight …” the Buffalo News wrote about the ACC brawl.

The hatred in the what now? On the long list of teams Toronto hates on principle (all of them), Buffalo’s buried beneath 50 feet of compacted garbage. We can barely hear them.

But like John Scott (native Edmontonian — another place none of us have ever been), Buffalo really wants to fight. Even in pre-season. Even when no one cares.

That’s got to be it, right? They just want us to care. Sorry, we can’t help. All our caring is wrapped up in a couple of hundred metres of asphalt at the Island Airport, so you can see we’re tapped out.

What we’d like to do is take hold of Buffalo by the shoulders and say, “It’s not you. It’s us. And no I can’t go with you to the Fight Prom.”

Then we could go back to trying to catch the attention of the only people whose opinion we really care about – ourselves.