During his college years, John taught me a million ways to stir up trouble without getting caught by the professors, deans, resident assistants, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, and all four branches of the U.S. Military. Granted, that was information I could have used while I was in college, but at least I now know a few things I can teach my niece and nephew when they’re ready to leave the nest and provide their parents with four years of heart failure.

Last week, my brother and his friend Matt decided to teach me about hockey. They took me to a Carolina Hurricanes game in Raleigh.

I learned many things while watching my first hockey game. I learned that hockey teams actually have cheerleaders, which makes no sense because they can’t cheer on the sidelines or they’ll risk losing their teeth to an airborne, 800 mile-per-hour puck. And ice isn’t exactly the best surface to be jumping around on anyway. ("Go team! Go team! Show that you’ve got class! Now call the paramedics because Amber just fell on her ass!")

I learned the rules of hockey pretty quickly. The game made sense. Guys hit puck with sticks. Puck goes into goal. Stadium management uses opportunity to award some lucky fan coupon for free bottle of windshield washer fluid from AutoZone. Sometimes puck flies into crowd, and instead of filing lawsuit, crowd battles for puck so they can win free hockey jersey as well as complimentary box of Band-Aids to treat injuries sustained in battle. Every once in a while, drunken fan agrees to appear on huge stadium video screens and do imitation of Prince singing "When Doves Cry" in order to win free tickets to next hockey game, assuming fan will want to reappear in public after sobering up.

So I was enjoying myself, despite the fact that the Hurricanes were playing like someone had spiked their Gatorade with Nyquil. They stumbled around the ice, looking depressed, hitting the puck in any random direction, sometimes directly to the opposing team. Matt, a longtime Canes fan, explained to me that the team had won an away game in overtime the night before and probably hadn’t gotten home until way past midnight.

John was less forgiving. "SOMEBODY HIT SOMEONE!!!!" he bellowed at the players. I told him it wasn’t a good idea to provoke big guys carrying potentially lethal weapons. He told me that judging by their speed on the ice, we’d have plenty of time to leave our seats, exit the stadium, find our car, and make it all the way to North Dakota before the players even got their skates off.

We were well into the third quarter when I witnessed one of the most bizarre events I have ever seen in sports. Two of the players got into a fight. It happened very quickly. They whipped off the gloves, and suddenly they were punching the hell out of each other.

That wasn’t the bizarre part. The bizarre part was when the two refs skated over to the fight. I expected them to break it up. Instead, they just stood there. While these two players were slamming each other’s heads into the ice, the refs studied the action from two feet away, frowning and nodding as if studying wild animal behavior for National Geographic.

"Shouldn’t the refs stop them?" I asked John in disbelief.

"No, no!" John said quickly, as if I’d just suggested sticking a fork into an electrical outlet. "You just gotta let them fight. They’re following protocol."

"Who? The refs?"

"No, the players." With his eyes glued to the fight, John explained, "When players start fighting, first they have to drop their sticks. Then they take off the gloves, and the best thing to do is try to pull your opponent’s jersey over his head so he can’t see and gets disoriented. Then you can start whaling on him."

"And this is part of the game rules?"

"Oh no. It’s a penalty."

Before I could even begin to sort that out, the huge video screens flickered to life, showing clips of fight scenes from movies. Jim Carrey beating himself up in Liar Liar. The two Girl Scouts throwing each other around a bar in Airplane!. They even had special graphics designed especially for fights. The Hurricane cheerleaders balanced themselves on the guardrails and did a special fight dance, fists punching the air. The crowd chanted special fight cheers. I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like, "Break his nose! Split his lip! Say to hell with sportsmanship!"

Eventually, the players got tired, and the refs pointed them to the penalty boxes. John and Matt settled back in their seats with satisfied smiles. "That was a great fight," said Matt.

I had a lot of questions, and the answers just made me more confused. From what I understood, fighting is a part of the game, but you’re not allowed to do it or you’ll get sent to the penalty box. But it’s a great part of the game that everyone looks forward to. Even though it’s bad.

John and Matt denied it, but I knew those fights had to be staged. They couldn’t be real. The players probably saw that the crowd was getting restless and decided to liven things up a bit. If those guys were really that mad, I don’t think they’d have the presence of mind to follow something called "fight protocol." They would make use of every weapon at their disposal. The team medics would spend the rest of the evening surgically removing shards of hockey sticks from the players’ spleens.

The coaches must count on those fights, too. I’ll bet they consider the fight potential of every new player. A well-adjusted player with no drug problems and a wife and kids who love him will spend a lot of time on the bench. A player whose third wife just left him and whose car just got stolen and whose son has just announced he’s getting surgery and from now on wants to be called "Alexa," well, he’ll be on that ice until he wears out his blades and puts the entire opposing team in intensive care.

The thing is, I got hooked. I love hockey. I even went to another home game the following week, where I stood and cheered as one with the rest of the crowd as a ref who had made a stupid call earlier in the game got body-slammed into the glass. All fourteen players involved claimed it was an accident.