ST. PAUL, Minn. — Hockey never forgives or forgets a sin. So sooner or later, the bad blood that began when Avalanche defenseman Tyson Barrie painfully limped off the ice in April after a cheap shot by Minnesota forward Matt Cooke will come back to bloody a victim wearing a Wild uniform.

“One day,” Patrick Roy told me Thursday, “it might be the opposite. One of our players will hurt one of their guys. And I’m sure everybody is going to be very happy to remind (Minnesota) what happened to Tyson Barrie.”

WATCH: Press Box: What went so wrong with the Avs?

During an embarrassing, puzzling and alarming 5-0 loss to Minnesota on Thursday night, maybe somebody on the Colorado bench should have hopped over the boards and thrown a punch at Cooke, just so the Avs could get off one good shot in the game.

Here is what was so disturbing: Against the team that rudely bounced Colorado from the playoffs last spring, the Avalanche did not put up a fight. Before the puck drops before every game in the Xcel Energy Center, the good people of Minnesota shout “Let’s play hockey!” so loudly it was confounding how the Avs were disturbingly somnambulant instead of skaters with jump.

Oh, bad feelings linger in the Colorado dressing room for the Wild and Cooke in particular. But, strangely, it seemed as if the Avs actively tried to cool their animosity for Minnesota.

“It’s like a volcano. It goes dormant,” explained Colorado defenseman Erik Johnson. “But it might wake back up again. It was a hard-fought series, and there’s a good rivalry brewing between Colorado and Minnesota. There’s no love lost between these two teams.”

At 11:25 a.m. on the opening day of the NHL regular season for Colorado, the first player to step on the ice for the morning skate was Barrie, in the same arena where Cooke wrecked Barrie’s knee and turned the momentum of a playoff series with a dirty hit 171 days earlier. The ugly, knee-on-knee shot by Cooke resulted in a seven-game suspension for the Wild player with a history of creating mayhem first, then apologizing later.

“It was definitely awful. Mentally, it was the toughest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in hockey. When it happened, I realized it wasn’t going to be the last time I saw the playoffs. It was frustrating. But it is what it is,” Barrie said after the team’s morning workout. “This is the place where my season ended. I like jumping right back in the fire. And if we can beat Minnesota right off the hop, we can put last year behind us, both the playoff loss and what happened to me personally.”

The Avs, however, came out shockingly flat against Minnesota. Barrie competed with fire. His Colorado teammates? Not so much.

Despite being given two power-play opportunities early in the first period, Colorado had difficulty generating a shot, let alone a strong scoring chance. The lack of puck possession, cited frequently by the gurus of hockey analytics as a primary reason to fear the Avalanche is headed for a big fall down the standings in the Western Conference, was a glaring problem. Poor offensive production that plagued the Avs throughout the preseason has obviously not been remedied, forcing Roy to tinker with his scoring lines on the fly against Minnesota, as he worked Matt Duchene and Ryan O’Reilly together in the hope of recreating some old magic.

While one game is too small a sample size to draw sure-fire conclusions, Jarome Iginla — the highly decorated, 37-year-old winger signed as free agent during the offseason — looked, quite frankly, like an old and slow legend. Goalie Semyon Varlamov often saved Colorado’s bacon last season. Against the Wild, he was shelled so unmercifully that Roy mercifully pulled Varly after two periods, after he allowed five scores on 38 shots.

“We didn’t engage. We avoided every battle,” said Roy, whose heavy sighs after the loss communicated his disgust even more sharply than his critical words. “I was surprised to see how easy it was to play against us.”

The Avs get another shot at Minnesota on Saturday, during their home opener at the Pepsi Center. Free advice to Cooke: Keep your head on a swivel. The first shot of the game might be a fist directed at a lowdown, dirty Wild man certain to be greeted in Denver by a chorus of boos.

Mark Kiszla: mkiszla@denverpost.com or twitter.com/markkiszla