“Slap Shot” turns 40 this month. No presents, please, unless they are wrapped in foil and reflect the enduring lessons of a counterculture classic.

Capturing the spirit of the thing is easier than scoring a tap-in goal.

Appreciating the raunchy parody’s takedown of carnival violence is more subtle yet no less prescient while the NHL digs in against a concussion crisis that exposes fighting as caveman smearing of an otherwise progressive sport.

There never was or has been a hockey movie with as richly drawn characters as this film about a bawdy team of minor-league dead-enders who brawl their way into fans’ hearts in a dying Pennsylvania mill town.

Mention the Hanson brothers, Ogie Ogilthorpe or “puttin’ on the foil” to any self-respecting hockey player or fan and they will recite verbatim one of the most quotable sports comedies of all time.

Panned by film critics when it was released in theaters Feb. 25, 1977, “Slap Shot” gained broader appeal during the VHS boom of the 1980s, when audiences could watch it repeatedly at home and pass it down like a working-class heirloom.

The NHL Network is celebrating the timelessness of “Slap Shot” with a 40th anniversary documentary airing Wednesday night. Among the devotees interviewed are Minnesota Wild all-star defenseman Ryan Suter and head coach Bruce Boudreau, who played an extra in the film and whose apartment became part of the set.

“Caddyshack” and “Major League” owe some of their irreverent acceptance to the trailblazing picture with a back story almost as entertaining as the final cut.

It is impossible to think of “Slap Shot” without leading man Paul Newman, the blue-eyed charmer who portrayed player-coach Reggie Dunlop as a foul-mouthed, manipulative dinosaur struggling to save his fading career with the fictitious Charlestown Chiefs.

Watching the movie on mute is worth it just to see Newman rocking Dunlop’s leather leisure suits, checkered slacks and fur-collar winter coat.

However, Universal Studios and George Roy Hill, who had just won an Oscar for directing Newman in “The Sting,” initially wanted Al Pacino for the lead. But Pacino could not skate. Neither could Nick Nolte or Peter Strauss, nascent stars who also failed to land the part.

But Newman skated well enough to fake it. So he lobbied hard to play Dunlop even though the crude dialogue represented a risky departure from his sympathetic everyman roles.

“The language is quite a bit beyond blue,” Newman said during a 1976 television interview NHL Network unearthed. “It’s heavy into purple almost. I don’t believe a thing is truly vulgar if it’s funny. Boy, it’s foul-mouthed, but it’s real and beautiful.”

Newman said he and Hill shared a six-pack of beer and negotiated the contract early one morning, and the rest is cinematic history. Related Articles Wild trade Eric Staal to Sabres for Marcus Johansson

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Off-screen, in the fall of 1975, Newman tapped Boudreau to teach him how to shoot pucks while filmmakers shot on location in Johnstown, Pa. To fill out the playing rosters they tapped real players from the Johnstown Jets, the developmental team for the St. Paul Fighting Saints of the fledgling World Hockey Association.

The ensemble included Jeff and Steve Carlson, real-life brothers, along with Dave Hanson, who kept his last name in the trio of bespectacled brothers who help turn the perpetually losing Chiefs into blood-soaked winners.

Boudreau was living at the time with Hanson and another teammate, Paul Holmgren, a St. Paul native who went on to star for the Philadelphia Flyers.

Hill used the trio’s apartment for scenes in which Newman’s character is unable to nap before a game because his telephone is constantly ringing after he went on the radio and put a bounty on the head of an opposing tough guy.

Boudreau also appeared briefly in game action as No. 7 on the Hyannisport Presidents, and even scored a goal against the Chiefs.

“It was a rough-and-tumble league,” Boudreau says. “The 17-hour bus rides, the very little pay. It was as low on the totem pole as you probably could get.”

The characters were brought to life by screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who turned a visit with her brother, Ned, a Johnstown player, into a chance to embed herself in the Jets’ dressing rooms, buses, hotel rooms, their apartments and favorite bars.

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Before he was one of the most respected sports broadcasters of his generation, Bob Costas was a struggling play-by-play announcer for the 1973-74 Syracuse Blazers, who played in the same league as the Jets.

“Slap Shot” exaggerated some of the league’s boorish behavior for dramatic effect, Costas told NHL Network, but not by much.

“In the one year that I did games, not only were there multiple fights in almost every game, but these were wild, almost cartoonish bench-clearing brawls in which the trainers would square off, the coaches would fight,” Costas said. “One time the bus driver went up into the stands to duke it out with some fans behind the penalty box.”

In the movie, Ned Braden, the Chiefs’ college-educated playmaker, refuses to fall in line with the successful brawling tactics. He is benched by Dunlop, who eventually realizes he is sullying his career by gooning it in a shameless ploy to sell tickets.

“Violence is killing this sport. It’s dragging it through the mud!” Dunlop tells the Chiefs before the league championship game. “If this keeps up, hockey players will be nothing but actors, punks!”

In the climactic scene, Braden turns a mirror on the bench-clearing brawlers by performing an on-ice striptease, peeling off his equipment piece by piece while the crowd roars before skating off with the trophy wearing nothing but a jock strap.

“Stop him!” an opposing player yells to the referee. “This is a serious game, not a freak show!”

“What do you mean a serious game? What are you talking about?” the ref responds. “This is hockey!”

The carnival barking in NHL games has subsided in the four decades since “Slap Shot” was in theaters, since the Broad Street Bullies paraded the Stanley Cup around Philadelphia for two seasons and bench-clearing brawls and players climbing the glass to attack venomous fans was more standard than anomaly.

The NHL boasts the fastest, most dynamic players in its 100-year history, but the sport of grace has a credibility gap so long as pugilism is accepted in an age of vigilant scrutiny of concussions and head injuries.

The league punishes instigators with extra penalties, and suspends players who use their sticks as weapons. Coaches are punitively fined and held accountable when their players start fights late in games.

But there is something grotesque in 2017 when a major North American sport banishes players — who drop their gloves and square off in mostly staged fights — to the penalty box for only five minutes before letting them back on the ice.

Charge the mound in baseball and you’re ejected, regardless of whether you land a blow. Punch another big man in the paint and you’re banished from the basketball court. Start a fight in pro football, arguably the most brutal sport on the planet, and you’re either benched, ejected, suspended, fined — sometimes all four — before the last yellow flag is picked up.

The NHL boasts the fastest, most dynamic players in its 100-year history, but the sport of grace has a credibility gap so long as pugilism is accepted in an age of vigilant scrutiny of concussions and head injuries.

At least six deceased NHL players have been diagnosed with the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

Commissioner Gary Bettman last year denied a link between concussions and CTE in the class-action lawsuit dozens of former players filed accusing the NHL of failing to warn them about the long-term effects of head injuries. Litigation will resolve those claims, and science ultimately will judge the link between CTE in hockey players and repeated blows to the head.

The question the NHL should be asking is why deny an easy safeguard by allowing fighting, which is banned at every amateur level, the IIHF world championships and Olympics?

“Slap Shot” taught us 40 years ago that violence as craven entertainment mocks the character and beauty of hockey.

The NHL celebrates the film’s legacy but still peddles in its shame.