Patrick Kane skates with grace, a raw-boned little man with a preternatural feel for the game and an asp’s bite of a backhand shot. He has hoisted the Stanley Cup over his head three times, most recently when the Chicago Blackhawks won the championship in June.

He was sanctified by Men’s Journal. “How Patrick Kane Saved Hockey,” the magazine headline read a year ago. The Sporting News this June gave a passing nod to his history of prodigious drinking and loutishness, only to assure us that he could still be a “wild child” but it was “an old story buried in a file.”

We have enough trouble knowing ourselves; better not to assume you can peer into another’s soul.

Sometime in the bleary early hours of Aug. 2, the former wild child rode to his $2.6 million lakeshore home near Buffalo with two women he had met in a nightclub. Not long after, one of those women accused Kane of raping her. She was examined at a local hospital and was found to have scratches on her legs and bite marks on her shoulder, The Buffalo News reported.

Now the N.H.L.’s Buffalo-born Prince Hal finds himself the subject of a criminal investigation into a rape allegation. No one is talking much. The Erie County district attorney, Frank A. Sedita III, whose grandfather once ran the political machine in Buffalo and who blanches at tackling politically delicate cases, has convened a grand jury and all but sewn his lips shut. Kane’s lawyer, Paul Cambria, who made his reputation as a First Amendment attorney for the porn industry and who defended Kane several years ago when he slugged a 62-year-old cabdriver, has, according to his secretary, “got no comment.”