PITTSBURGH — Bobby Farnham is waiting in the lobby of the Cambria Suites, a newish hotel that sits atop a hill overlooking the CONSOL Energy Center, home of the Pittsburgh Penguins. A car is coming. The car will pick up Farnham and his teammate, Scott Harrington, and drive them four and a half half hours back to eastern Pennsylvania, where the Penguins’ AHL affiliate, the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, awaits them.

Farnham and Harrington had found out they were being sent down to the AHL team the night before, after the Penguins lost to the Bruins in a game for which neither had dressed. After the Penguins lost a nailbiter in overtime, Farnham walked back to his hotel to recharge his iPhone. His hotel room phone rang.

It was Jim Britt, the Penguins manager of team services, the guy who calls when things like this happen. Farnham apologized for being unreachable, explained that his phone had died, then Britt told Farnham he had a meeting with the coach and the assistant GM. Farnham knew what that meant – he was going back to Wilkes-Barre in the morning.

Farnham, 25, just spent 12 games with the Penguins as an official member of its NHL roster. He played in 10 of those games. He traveled to Florida to play the Panthers and the Lightning, got to see the ice in New Jersey against the Devils. He sat in a locker room with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, practiced with them, told jokes, got laughs. He got in three fights in 10 games, drew some penalties, and heard the roar of the crowd when a teammate scored a goal while he was on the ice.

He even got a nickname: Farns.

Now he is in the lobby of the Cambria Suites, and the car will be here any second. But Farnham is in no rush.

Asked if he needs to run up to his room to finish packing before the car gets there, he says: “It can wait.”

Farnham is listed at 5-foot-10, 188 pounds, but when he’s out on the ice he looks tiny compared to the other players. Team rosters also are notorious for fudging this sort of thing, but in Farnham’s case the roster is more or less right. He does stand about 5-foot-10, and he’s thick in the shoulders the way that hockey players are.

Farnham’s hands are what are arresting, though. They’re massive, and hard. The skin is ripped on the knuckles, scabbed over and calloused above his wrists. He’s got a small blood blister on his left pinkie, a blister he doesn’t seem to notice but looks pretty damn painful. His hands make Farnham seem older, somehow.

Farnham’s eyes are bright and kind, and he smiles often. When he talks, he finishes most sentences with “you know?” then looks at you, expectantly, until you nod and confirm that you do, in fact, know. He’s wearing gray sweats, a black T-shirt with a complicated logo, and a red beanie covering up his shaggy blond hair.

He refuses to order breakfast until I tell him that I can expense it, then he orders exactly what I’m having, down to the way I like my eggs. Then he explains how he got here.

Farnham grew up in an affluent suburb in northeastern Massachusetts. His father is Bobby Sr., a legendary receiver at Brown University who played in the CFL with the Toronto Argonauts. His mother is Glorianne Demoulas, of that Demoulas family, who this fall were involved in a major familial dispute over the ownership of the grocery chain Market Basket. His mom was on the side of Arthur T. Demoulas, the now-restored owner who the employees all loved so much they walked out when he lost control of the company, and it was a whole big thing, and Farnham doesn’t like to talk about it, like at all. He likes to talk about hockey.

For high school Farnham went to Brooks, a small prep school in North Andover, Mass., then transferred to Phillips Academy, a town over, because the hockey there was better. Then he went to Brown, like his father and uncles and cousin Buddy Farnham (who had a brief stint as a Patriots special-teams player). Bobby Farnham graduated with a degree in Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship.

What all this means is that Farnham doesn’t have to live the life of a fringe professional hockey player. He doesn’t have to get punched in the face weekly, spend nights sleeping on the floor of buses stuffed with tired minor-league hockey players, play four games in four nights in Syracuse, Norfolk, Hershey, and Binghamton.

He doesn’t have to live and die each week, waiting for The Call.

“When I tell people I went to Brown, especially down in the minors, they’re surprised,” he says. “I’ll tell people in Wilkes-Barre, and they’re like, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”

Bobby Farnham doesn’t have the quickness and otherworldly vision of teammate Sidney Crosby, nor the elegant power of Evgeni Malkin. Crosby is a genius, obviously, but his genius lies in his ability to find seams, exploit them. He sees passes and angles no one else does. He’s shifty and crafty, almost fox-like in the way he plays. Malkin, on the other hand, looks like he was constructed in some Russian laboratory; watching him play I can’t help but think back to the Ivan Drago training scenes in Rocky IV.

Farnham isn’t any of that. His game is predicated on being annoying, mostly, from what I can tell. He pesters opponents, jabs them, tries to get them to retaliate and earn his team a power play.

“I scored a ton in high school,” he says. “I always laugh when people say that … but when I got to play pro hockey, I was like, ‘I’m not going to score goals here. I’m not going to be a top six forward anywhere, AHL or NHL, so I gotta start doing stuff that no one wants to do.’”

What he does has its admirers.

“He brings energy to the game and energy to your team,” says Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins head coach John Hynes. “He’s very difficult to play against, because he has a very persistent and relentless work ethic, so he’s a very good forechecker. And his number one asset is his speed.”

Hockey has been changing over the past two decades or so, Farnham explains as his eggs and hash browns cool. The game is faster now, opened up by rule changes, yes, but also by players just learning to skate more efficiently.

“You can’t do that clutching and grabbing, the old time hockey with all the big guys,” Farnham says. “It used to be that every team had a couple roster spots for seasoned tough guys, but now the game has changed.”

Enforcers have to be quick now, which is how a 5-foot-10 kid from an upscale Massachusetts suburb, a kid who never scored all that many goals in college or the AHL, found himself playing in the biggest professional hockey league in the world.

He was quick … and he was willing to fight.

Why do hockey players fight?

There seems to be a general fear that without players enforcing rules themselves, hockey would change very quickly. Right now, the thinking goes, a player knows that if he runs Sidney Crosby into the boards from behind, he’s going to get punched by one of Crosby’s teammates.

If fighting is eliminated, then, someone will have to step in and make it not worthwhile to cheap-shot Sidney Crosby. That onus would fall on the refs, who would have to start calling the game tighter and the league would have to start issuing longer suspensions.

Not everyone buys that.

“I think has been an excuse to keep it around,” says Greg Wyshynski, editor of Yahoo’s Puck Daddy blog. “I think back in Gretzky’s day, when he had guys like Dave Semenko and Marty McSorley on the Oilers, that was a time when it did keep other guys honest … but the game changed.”

There’s another way of looking at hockey fights. It isn’t just about protecting the stars, really, but more so about allowing non-stars to stay in the game.

Hockey players and coaches love lesser-skilled brawlers who get called up because they’re willing to do whatever it takes. They love coaching and being teammates with guys who care nothing for themselves and only for the team, and fighting allows players like that to stay in the sport, all the way up to the pros.

Farnham isn’t 6-foot-7. He has ability, but he doesn’t possess rare vision or skill. He’s a normal-sized guy who made it because he was willing to work harder than anyone else and sacrifice his body.

Watching Farnham, who is an exceptional athlete but still human, is very different than watching Crosby or Malkin. A normal person could never be Malkin. But there is a reality, maybe one in a million, where he could be Farnham.

Farnham and other hockey fighters, the scrappers who work hard and chew up minutes on the fourth line, they are the ones who make hockey greatness attainable, and for that, we love them. We demand players like them, even, because without guys like Farnham there’d only be slick-handed skill guys and me-first goal-scorers and fast, technically sound, levelheaded defenders and who wants any of that?

Fighting exists so that guys like Farnham can exist. In that way, it is beautiful.

What isn’t beautiful about fighting is what it does to the fighters, especially years later, when all the jabs and crosses and jarring checks into the boards catch up with them.

Their stories are horrifying and tough to read. Remember Derek Boogaard, an enforcer who played for the Wild and the Rangers and died at age 28 from an alcohol and drug overdose. He was recovering from a concussion at the time, and an examination of his brain after his death revealed evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease that is being found at an alarming rate in the brains of former NFL players, boxers and (more and more often) hockey enforcers.

Farnham clams up when asked about his brain. He says he has never been diagnosed with a concussion, knock on wood, and I don’t know whether or not to believe him. He is a little worried though, and he knows his mom is, too.

“She’s worried about it. She’s walked out of the rink when I’ve fought before,” he says. “My dad doesn’t like it either. I mean, he gets it, but he doesn’t like it. He tells me almost every game, ‘Don’t fight. Don’t worry about fighting.’ That’s a parent’s perspective, though.”

And Farnham proudly notes that he’s started turning down fights, something he never did in his first year with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, when he got in 25 fights and would go with just about anyone who glanced in his general direction. He fought big guys even, guys way out of his weight class, guys who’d put him down in seconds. He’s stopped that.

“I’ve earned that right. I tell guys to themselves now. I’ll say that, too. I’ll say: ‘Go yourself.’ I can do that now.” He pauses, then laughs. “Well, I can do that down in the AHL. I can’t do that up here.”

He’s also taken boxing classes in the summer in Boston, working with the same guy who trains 37-year-old Panthers enforcer Shawn Thornton. Farnham tells me excitedly about the time he got to spar with Thornton, a session that ended with Farnham on his backside after he caught one square in the face from the 6-foot-2, 220 pound Thornton.

“He’s a big dude, such a nice guy,” says Farnham. “He wasn’t even trying to hit me, but he caught me once, like ‘whoa!’”

Despite Farnham Sr. saying his son doesn’t need to fight anymore, that he’s earned the right to just play the game, I’m not sure that’s true.

During the Penguins’ game against the Avalanche, in a moment captured in the video above, Colorado enforcer Cody McLeod challenged Farnham to go. After the fight, which McLeod more or less won, the two chirped at each other in the penalty box, with McLeod informing Farnham that he’d need to fight if he wants to stay up in this league. Or score goals, one or the other. Farnham laughed and told him he didn’t think he was going to get enough minutes to score goals, which, by their logic, left only one thing for him to do.

So why does Bobby Farnham do this? He’s from a wealthy family, has a great education. Why does he subject himself to the pain, to the dank hotel rooms and long bus rides and constant up-and-down life of a player on the fringe of the NHL?

He doesn’t really have an answer. He says he really loves hockey and that he only has so much time to pursue this dream.

What of his friends making hundreds of thousands of dollars on Wall Street? The ones who get nice bonuses and golf trips and live in beautiful apartments that are not at all like the crummy hotels the AHL team stays in.

“I couldn’t sit behind a desk and do that right now, you know?” he said. “I’d rather just do something else. I always thought I’d work for my family’s company, too, but for now … we’ll see what happens.”

Bobby Farnham has gotten in somewhere between 40 and 50 fights on the ice, he estimates. He has suffered a high ankle sprain, torn cartilage in his oblique, had a lacerated kidney, a collapsed lung and a broken rib. He isn’t sure how many times he’s broken his nose. He’s had more black eyes than he can remember, and guesses he’s had about 100 stitches put into his face since college.

Farnham has suffered. He wouldn’t ever admit that, but he has. He’s endured pain far more than anyone from his background would normally have to endure. I don’t know if that makes him brave or crazy, or maybe some combination of the two. But Farnham has made his peace with suffering, and his love of a game and pursuit of a dream, however briefly he may live that dream, is enough for him.

“You can never take those ten NHL games away,” he says. “I got my foot in the door. I was here. It was something I always dreamed of, and it was something I always said when I was down in the AHL: ‘I’d love to just play one game.’ So now I’ve played ten, and I just … I just want to get back here.”

All this gets to the heart of the matter: Farnham has made a decision. He made that decision when he was a senior at Brown, and his “advisor” (who is now his agent) explained that he needed to be willing to change his game if he ever wanted to make the NHL. Farnham did change the way he played, brought a new feistiness to his game, and as he started his professional career, first with the Wheeling Nailers (seriously) of the ECHL and then Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, he fought anyone he could. It was a way of standing out. It was a niche that he could fill, and it worked. He made it here. He got his shot.

Other photos: Getty Images, Getty Images, USA TODAY Sports. Layout produced by Rubie Edmondson.