MONTREAL—An awful, horrifying moment.

Again. AGAIN.

After a summer in which the Bettman adminstration fiddled with silly rules like tucking in hockey jerseys and made changes to icing into a debate worthy of the Meech Lake Accord, of course it was the elephant in the room that made itself heard on opening night of the 2013-14 NHL season.

Fighting. The dangerous, pointless, bloody shame of fighting in the NHL, the combination of a league terrified to let the sport stand on its own two feet and a union that refuses to protect its workers.

In his 211th professional fight, Montreal’s George Parros went down for the count on Tuesday night, missing Maple Leafs enforcer Colton Orr with a wild haymaker and awkwardly hurling himself face-first into the ice as the bloodthirsty Bell Centre crowd, so thrilled with its new goon, roared.

And then went deathly, eerily silent.

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Parros didn’t get up. Didn’t move. Just laid there face down, out cold. Two years earlier, it was Orr who had suffered a brain injury in a scrap with Parros, and this time the tables were turned.

Orr immediately waved for the Canadiens’ training staff. Soon, a stretcher arrived. Later, Parros was taken to hospital, struck down with a brain injury of his own in his first game wearing the famed bleu, blanc et rouge.

“You don’t want to see someone hurt like that. It was the worst situation,” said Orr, who looked shocked by the incident afterwards.

The fact the Leafs won the first game of the year 4-3? All but lost in the aftermath, with players spouting the usual clichés, all afraid to step out of line, while social media exploded with revulsion and the usual excuses poured in like blood from a wound that never closes.

Worst of all, it was a pointless fight that came after Montreal’s Jarred Tinordi tangled with Toronto’s Carter Ashton. Orr and P.K. Subban started shoving, and then Parros arrived to engage the Leaf tough guy in their second fight of the night.

“He defended his teammates,” Leafs head coach Randy Carlyle said of Parros. “It’s hard for the players to emotionally get back up to the same level (afterwards). It is an event nobody feels very good about.”

Before that, with the signing of Leaf winger Phil Kessel to a massive $64 million contract in the morning, and then with a game that was equal parts scrambly, fun and entertaining, there had been a great deal to talk about.

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But when you see a man so badly injured, and so pointlessly, almost everything else seemed unimportant afterwards.

“(Parros) put himself on the line, he sacrificed himself,” said Montreal defenceman Josh Gorges. “If you asked George tomorrow, he’d say just because he got hurt you don’t take fighting out of hockey.”

So many awful stories in recent years. Don Sanderson. Derek Boogaard. David Dziurzynski, kayoed by Toronto’s Frazer McLaren just last year. Now Parros, one of the biggest, baddest scrappers of them all.

The more buckets of blood, the more the NHL promotes this stuff, catering to the lowest common denominator. One man falls, just call up the next contestant on Who Wants to Risk a Brain Injury for $750,000 a Year?

The truly sick part here is that the 33-year-old, six-foot-five Parros hadn’t even played a pre-season game after off-season shoulder surgery. But Montreal head coach Michel Therrien, feeling his team was pushed around by the Leafs last season, stuck him in the lineup anyway.

For the Leafs, it was a five-fight night, the brawling style of hockey Brian Burke wanted to bring to town and the style Carlyle has brought to life by dressing one of the NHL’s biggest, toughest lineups every night.

The visitors also delivered plenty of firepower against a Montreal team that didn’t get top-drawer performances from its two best blue-liners, Andrei Markov and Subban, while goalie Carey Price didn’t have the kind of night that will quiet his naysayers.

Kessel didn’t score, but marquee Leafs like James van Riemsdyk, Dion Phaneuf and Tyler Bozak did, while the fourth Toronto goal, the first by newcomer Mason Raymond, stood up as the winner.

The Leafs made mistakes, plenty of them, including a bobble by Jake Gardiner with less than three minutes to play that allowed Lars Eller to cut Toronto’s lead to 4-3. Moments later, goalie James Reimer made a sensational, pad-stacking save on Subban, and eventually the Leafs dribbled out the clock.

Reimer, who may sit Wednesday night in Philadelphia in favour of newly acquired Jonathan Bernier, played down his battle for the crease.

“When I’m in there, I’m not competing with anybody,” said Reimer, who like Price made 34 saves. “I’m competing against the other team.”

All these things — Kessel’s contract, the goals, Reimer’s play, the disappointing start for the Habs, Paul Ranger’s first NHL game in almost four years — should have been the subjects of post-game chatter and intrigue.

Instead, it was a fight. A stupid, pointless fight and another brain injury.

The shame on this game continues.