LEWISTON – Here’s a good rule of thumb for you parents living vicariously through your kids’ athletic accomplishments: Don’t.

There, now that we’ve cleared that up, here’s another heapin’ helpin’ of friendly advice: If you’re trying to teach those kids the right way to play the game, tell them they’re permanently grounded from watching the pros.

Friday night at a less-than-maxed-out Colisee, the Lewiston Maineiacs and Cape Breton Screaming Eagles needed only six minutes to give prudes and purists reason to send the kiddos on a run for pretzels and popcorn.

Yes, I know players in the Canadian Hockey League are not explicitly professional, but you do the math. They’re sequestered in rinks from Saint John to Saskatoon, from August until April, playing for organizations that charge real, honest-to-goodness U.S. and Canadian currency to watch the product.

They walk like pros. They quack like pros. And last night, much to their discredit, they behaved like pros.

Before one goal was scored in Lewiston’s home opener, a 4-3 loss, there were two fights. Campy, contrived-looking fights that World Wrestling Entertainment or even Tony Atlas’ low-budget cousin could have done better in this same arena during that eight-week lull otherwise known as hockey’s off-season.

With two of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’s most highly touted teams engaged in an early feeling-out process that packed all the intensity of a poetry reading, Cape Breton’s Bradley Gallant and Lewiston’s Triston Manson made the grievous error in judgment of entering the same zip code.

We can’t be sure if Manson was responding to an unsavory comment about his mom, a la mildly disgraced French soccer legend Zinedine Zidane. What was apparent to the naked eye is that one second, Cape Breton and Lewiston were playing a perfectly pure game of pond hockey, and the next, gloves and sticks were crashing to the ice with an obligatory thud.

Teammates bolted to the boards like rats yearning to flee the waterlogged lower level of a sinking ship, lest they be accused of committing hockey’s unpardonable sin and becoming the dreaded third man in. Manson, a 20-year-old trucked in this year almost exclusively for his ability to whip the snot out of anyone in another uniform caught breathing heavily around one of Lewiston’s stars, did his job and wrestled Gallant to the ice.

Somebody cleverly cued up Nirvana’s anthem of 1990s aggression, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” What, did they forget to plug in the spotlight?

Predictably, the hodgepodge crowd of men, women and children went berserk. Those having achieved the age of majority barely had time to lament the beer they’d spilled when the fine line between gamesmanship and belligerence received another toeing.

Lewiston’s Danick Hudon-Paquette tried in vain to track down a centering pass in front of Cape Breton goalie Ondrej Pavelec, ultimately skating through the crease and colliding with the Eagles’ netminder. The collision was no more intentional than you or I slipping on a banana peel and busting our tailbone.

Naturally, Cape’s Charlie Pens didn’t see it that way, so he responded by playing tether ball with the back of Hudon-Paquette’s head. This went over like a loud belch in Sunday school with the fallen Maineiac, and the two new friends engaged in a round of synchronized macho posturing while the mixed company again went nuts. Oh, speaking of Sunday school, the PA’s musical accompaniment for this tango: “If You’re Happy And You Know It.”

Go ahead. Tell me it’s a part of the game.

I’ve enjoyed high school and college hockey for nearly three decades and can count on one hand the number of 1-on-1 fights I’ve seen. The game hasn’t suffered one scintilla.

You can be sure much of the mass roaring its approval of this silly ritual were the same people reacting with righteous indignation when Zidane head-butted his Italian rival in this past summer’s World Cup final, or when Tennessee Titans defensive lineman Albert Haynesworth stomped on an opponent’s helmet-less head last week.

Go ahead. Tell me why this is any different.

What’s different is our reaction. We’re giving tacit approval to violence for the sake of violence, and we’re basing it on the faulty conclusion that hockey is entitled to its own etiquette and self-policing standards.

Most of us frown upon baseball’s I’ll-hit-you-because-you-hit-one-of-our-guys unwritten code of conduct. This is every bit as asinine. So why does hockey get a pass?

Pens and Gallant each received a piddling five minutes in the penalty box for their misdeeds, leaving both players scot-free to have a hand in the late, first-period goal that gave Cape Breton the lead for good.

Go ahead. Explain that to your little, aspiring hockey player while you’re trying to teach him or her right from wrong.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].