Avery’s ploy had been unorthodox, unprecedented, and, as players and sages would declare afterward, “embarrassing” and “bush”—akin, maybe, to doing pushups over the twelfth hole at Augusta while an opponent is putting for par.

The next day, amid Pan-Canadian outrage, the NHL issued a decree, informally known as the Sean Avery Rule, or the Nitwit Rule: no more doing that, whatever it was.

The innovation, like midget batsmen and airplane shoe-bombing, would prove to be short-lived.

I don't care about hockey, or agitators, but I am positively intrigued by the idea of "pan-Canadian outrage."