It hasn't been a good summer for the ice girls. The Florida Panthers continued their cost-cutting measures, sacking the entire ice girls program not long after doing the same to their sales staff. A Mother Jones piece quoted a former Philadelphia Flyers' ice girl describing her work at the Winter Classic by saying, "It really felt like we were in some kind of torture camp."

And over in San Jose, the Sharks somehow came to the decision that the summer of 2014 was the right time to bring in under-dressed ice girls, just as other teams were beginning to realize the issues with the practice, like how trotting women out as something to gawk at marginalizes them, and alienates female hockey fans who can't help but notice the in-game entertainment isn't for them and can only be left to assume the game isn't either.

Unsurprisingly, there was a backlash in San Jose, with some fans threatening to cancel their season tickets (although if their goal was to distract people from the similarly polarizing signing of John Scott with a different controversy, well, that's some quality misdirection).

Anyway. Ice girls are a big topic in hockey this summer, which might explain why, after it went largely unnnoticed in the spring of 2013, the climate was suddenly right for a video of Zach Parise spitting on an ice girl to light up Reddit late Sunday night, well over a year after it happened:

Amazing, too, that the announcer is speaking about how people usually get rewarded for going to "the dirty area". At that exact moment, an ice girl is skating through what could reasonably be called "loogie row", the dirtiest area of them all, where players expel gobs of saliva all game long. And she is hardly rewarded.

Sadly, we don't get to see her face, but we do get to see Parise's, and he reacts with appropriate horror. "Oh spit," he says, if my lip-reading is anything to write home about.

But now that it's having it's day, let's add it to the list of reasons hockey needs to do away with scantily-clad ice girls. Not only is it an affront to hockey's entertainment value that people think the game needs eye candy between the whistles, and an absurd double standard to parade them out in those tiny outfits when the dudes get to wear, like, pants and a windbreaker, but all that exposed upper body increases the chances that a zoned-out Zach Parise will spit right where you can feel it. He is a saliva-spewing menace for whom proper precautions should be taken. Fortunately, the Wild seem to know, which is why their ice girls get long-sleeved shirts.

For what it's worth, though, karma sought its revenge on Parise. Just under a year later, an American bald eagle vomited all over him.