IN hockey, a player's facial scars are part of the job description. If he's cut, he's quickly stitched and he's back on the ice by the next period. That's the hockey credo. Always has been. Always will be. It has also been the hockey credo for anybody in the stands who got hit by a flying puck. Get a few stitches, then return to your seat.

But please be alert. Watch the puck. After all, you're the one at risk.

''Spectators,'' it says right there on a Madison Square Garden ticket, ''are at their own risk with respect to the dangers incidental to the event.''

But suddenly the risk is greater than just the scar from a few stitches.

Last weekend, for the first time at an N.H.L. game, a flying puck killed a spectator. Brittanie Cecil died last Monday, two days before her 14th birthday and two days after she was struck in the forehead by a deflected puck while sitting in the 19th row at a Blue Jackets game in Columbus, Ohio. The cause, the county coroner said, was the rupture of an artery to her brain when her head snapped back in a whiplash.

Stunned and embarrassed, the National Hockey League has promised to analyze and examine spectator safety, as it must. But one remedy is obvious: double the height of the 8-foot-high plexiglass panels atop the boards in the area behind the goal at each end of the rink. The panels are lower along the sides of the rink.