Dr. Glen Bergeron saw the hit on Winnipeg Jets rookie Patrik Laine a few days ago, but he saw it a lot differently than you and I did.

The director of the Heads-Up Concussion Institute at the University of Winnipeg, Bergeron is also a sports fan.

But he’s not a fan of hits like the one that sidelined Laine with a concussion.

“I cringe when I see those hits,” Bergeron told me. “I see the brain inside the skull, and I know what’s going on in there at the time of the hit. And it’s frightening.”

As head athletic therapist at both the U of W and the U of M through the 1980s and ‘90s, Bergeron has treated countless athletes.

Leg or arm injuries can be horrific, but there’s nothing like dealing with head trauma, which often starts as the great unknown.

“I’ve gone onto the ice or onto the field far too many times where one of my athletes has been totally motionless — and I have the fear of god in me,” Bergeron said. “And I’ve had two or three athletes who’ve had traumatic brain bleeds who we’ve had to rush to hospital and save their lives.”

One of those was at the University of Alberta. Another with a junior hockey team.

Bergeron looked at Laine, prone on the ice in Buffalo on Saturday, and feared the worst. Did the 18-year-old Finn have a brain bleed, or was his brain just rattled?

“Nobody knew and nobody could know,” he said. “And all we could do was sit there and wait. I saw the hit and I looked at it probably another 10 times after that. Patrik Laine could just as easily have had a spinal cord injury, a concussion or one of those (brain bleeds). It was that high an impact.”

There are two reasons why the NHL now pulls concussed players from the game.

One, we know the dangerous effects of concussion upon concussion, even more risky when the first brain injury hasn’t yet healed.

Secondly, the only way to know if an athlete has bleeding around the brain is to watch them closely. If neurological symptoms deteriorate, it’s trouble.

Bergeron has dealt with that emergency — the athlete rushed to hospital, where they’ll drill holes in their skull to relieve the pressure — too often.

Bergeron’s experience has taken him down a road most of us will never travel. But he might be able to lead us to a different way of thinking.

“When I talk to athletes now, I say I don’t want to see the highlight hit anymore,” he said. “Highlight hits are opportunistic. They’re an opportunity when you can catch someone who’s vulnerable and lay a licking on them. What you’re doing is using excessive force to accomplish a task, but you’re putting that person at risk.

“Hits have a place in hockey, to the extent that they achieve the objective they’re supposed to achieve. And that is to remove the puck from the athlete. But not the athlete from the puck.”

At this point in our conversation I had a confession: I enjoy hits like Jake McCabe’s on Laine. Clean, by hockey’s current rules, but devastating.

Of course, I’m not alone. One of the game’s attractions is its brute force. It’s in decline, sure, but who wants it to disappear entirely?

As I wrote in this space a day earlier, Laine learned a valuable rookie lesson about keeping your head up.

“It is a very expensive lesson — and it could have been much more expensive than that,” Bergeron countered.

Then he made an interesting point: if you could stop the action and ask McCabe, just before the hit, if he wanted to cause irreparable brain damage, he’d no doubt say no.

Yet, following through risked exactly that.

“He could have found another way of making contact and controlling him and it would have had the same result — the puck would have gone away,” Bergeron said.

Without the risk.

“I’ve always said the biggest problem we have with hockey right now is athletes have lost respect for each other. Or it’s not top of mind.”

Maybe you could say the same about us.

Do we really need highlight-reel hits, just for the sake of being entertained for a few seconds?

Bergeron’s experience and words got me re-thinking how I feel about them.

From now on, I’ll probably watch them differently, too.

Encouraging signs with Laine's concussion

It’s nearly impossible to predict how long it will take the Jets’ Patrik Laine to recover from his concussion.

Dr. Glen Bergeron, director of the Heads-Up Concussion Institute at the University of Winnipeg, says in many cases people rebound relatively quickly — from a low of seven to 10 days to a high of six weeks — from shaken brains caused by head trauma.

“A concussion is going to be different for everybody,” Bergeron said. “There will be people who fall on the quicker recovery side and people who fall on the longer recovery time.”

Concussions are no longer graded by severity when they first happen. The severity is determined by the symptoms, and how long they last.

Laine, concussed Saturday in Buffalo, was seen around the rink on Monday, and although he didn’t skate that’s a good sign.

“If he’s up and about and not feeling like he has to stay in bed and away from bright lights or from teammates and loud noises and those kinds of things — those are all really good signs that maybe his concussion is much more minor than it could have been,” Bergeron said.

Watching the hit many times over, Bergeron said he couldn’t be sure if Laine was knocked unconscious.

“Their arms usually go up and then they fall down. And his didn’t do that. And his head was rigid and up — he didn’t let his head fall down. So it’s hard to tell right off the bat whether he was or not.”

pfriesen@postmedia.com

Twitter: @friesensunmedia