I won’t pretend to know much about hockey, but I do know something about newspapers and, looking back, what we did last Saturday probably deserves five minutes in the penalty box.

Last Friday, the plan seemed simple: The Maineiacs were in town for their home opener. We would have coverage on A-1 (for the second day in a row) and coverage on the front of the sports section.

This would be a big night. We would send two photographers, instead of the usual one, to the Colisee. We would send two writers, instead of one, for complete coverage.

The game story and photo would go inside. A photo and column about the game and season ahead would go on A-1.

Kalle Oakes is one of the best writers in Maine. If you doubt that, consider that he received a first-place award from the Maine Press Association last Saturday night, besting every other daily sports columnist in the state.

His job is to have opinions and put them in print, and he does it well. On Friday night, he returned from the Maineiacs game with the opinion that there had been too much pointless fighting and chided fans for cheering it on.

Since then, we’ve heard from you, our readers. Many of you think he’s wrong about that, others think he was right on target.

And that’s as it should be. Columnists aren’t politicians; they’re not paid to make everyone happy. Rather, they are expected to have strong, well-expressed, well-informed opinions about sports.

Our mistake, I think, was going ahead with our plan to run that on the front page. That’s where readers expect to find unvarnished facts and balanced reporting. By design, columns draw conclusions, make judgments and express opinions.

They contain facts, but they go beyond that, and they rarely run on the front page.

When they do, we must clearly identify them as opinion pieces. Saturday’s column had Kal’s byline and the name of his column, “Hot Corner.” Usually, his column runs inside with his photo, which further suggests it’s his opinion.

Saturday’s column did not include his photo, and we should have more clearly labeled it as an opinion piece.

Beyond that, though, the front page was just the wrong place for a column of that sort on the day after the home opener.

That’s not Kal’s fault. It’s mine. I should not have agreed to run a column on A-1 without being more specific about the focus.

When we pull something out of the paper and put it on the front page, we’re telling readers that it is of unusual importance or significance. The column was good, but it certainly wasn’t the intent of the Sun Journal to focus A-1 reader attention on the issue of sports brawls on the first night of the home season.

Since running that column, we have received a flood of e-mails. They have ranged from calm and well-reasoned to hysterical and threatening.

As if to prove Kal’s point, one fan said he hoped to run into him after a game and “put the fear of god” into him. Well, we take those kinds of threats against our people seriously and have passed that man’s name and e-mail address along to the Lewiston Police.

Other fans have questioned the Sun Journal’s support for the team, which is silly. We’ve been behind the team from the beginning, both as a major sponsor, in editorials and by dedicating hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hours to coverage by staff writers and photographers.

That will continue.

So, we apologize to fans for the placement of the column. But fans must also realize that player and crowd behavior are legitimate topics of sports commentary.

It was a good column, but in the wrong place at the wrong time.