When you come right down to it, other than its rather indisputable claim to being "the fastest game on ice", isn't the principal characteristic distinguishing hockey from other so-called "major" sports the fact that, unlike, say, a football or a basketball or a baseball, an ice-hockey puck is about the size of a man's mouth?
The National Hockey League has traditionally been a handsome source of livelihood for dentists on both sides of the Canadian border. If one plays the game long enough, sooner or later a puck sailing through the air at supersonic speeds is going to catch one in the chops, and voila - instant Cascarino.
Now, a hockey player losing teeth is a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one, which makes all the more curious the fuss being made over Boston Bruins captain Ray Bourque's run-in with a wayward puck on Monday.
In an attempt to block a slap shot with his stick, he instead deflected the missile and caught it flush in the mouth. Right away, it looked as if somebody had spilled Tic-Tacs on the FleetCenter ice.
The game was momentarily halted while team-mates crawled about the frozen surface retrieving several of Bourque's teeth. The player was led away to the locker-room, where nearly a dozen stitches were taken in his upper lip.
A day later Bourque was back on the ice and practising with his team, whom he accompanied to Atlanta for the return bout (last night) with the Thrashers. He did his best to discourage the media from making a fuss over his misfortune, declining to pose for the close-ups the television crews were so eager to record.
And two days later he was still on the front pages of both Boston dailies. A fellow columnist at the Boston Herald described Bourque as "an ageless, tireless freak whose pain threshold is higher than Whitney Houston's".
It occurred to me that Bourque's name had come up in conversation just a few nights earlier. A Dublin friend and I had been discussing over a pint Tom Humphries's tongue-in-cheek column proposing an Irish Olympic ice-hockey team.
"He forgot to mention Ray Bourque," said my friend Gogarty. "I'm sure if you look back far enough the Bourques came from Burkes."
I told Gogarty that in fact the reverse was probably the case, that as far as I knew it was a Norman name and that the Burkes in Ireland probably all had Bourques lurking somewhere in their family closets.
It was 21 years ago, during the 1979 World Series, that I first heard of Ray Bourque. The Bruins had just drafted the young defenceman, and a Montreal columnist named Tim Burke (presumably no relation) pulled me aside one afternoon and told me to keep an eye out for the teenage prodigy who would shortly arrive in Boston.
"He's special," said Tim.
He was right. Bourque almost immediately settled into his role as the heir to the great Bobby Orr, and has for two decades comfortably upheld that legacy. At 39, he has come to be revered in these parts, not only for his toughness but because, at least up until the moment on Monday when he started spewing Chicklets, he had somehow managed to retain the same boyish good looks he brought with him on his first trip across the border two decades earlier.
"You never want to see anybody take a puck in the mouth like that," said Boston goaltender Byron Dafoe, who himself lost a tooth in a game two years ago. "Especially Ray."
"Once in a while, it's your turn,"' shrugged Bourque as he prepared to return to the ice last night. "Whenever it happens, it's not fun, but you move on. This can be fixed. A lot of us who get their teeth broken end up looking better."
