I grew up with those feelings.

After losing a second Game 7 of a Stanley Cup Finals, the Canucks, and the city of Vancouver, can officially join Buffalo and Cleveland in a miserable place for fandom: sports purgatory.

For a fan, there is nothing worse than coming close to a championship, only to fall short. Growing up when the Buffalo Bills were repeatedly reaching the Super Bowl – only to suffer one agonizing loss after another once they made it there – I learned the hard way how rough sports purgatory can be. I famously predicted to my grandfather at halftime of the 1993 wild-card playoff game between the Bills and Oilers, when the Bills were trailing 28-3, that they would come back and win the game.

That’s because it was unfathomable to me that the Bills wouldn’t make it to the Super Bowl. But once they got there? As much as I wished for something else to happen, I knew in the pit of my stomach what was destined to happen.

Fans from towns like Buffalo and Cleveland know what I’m talking about. Plays like “No Goal,” when the Dallas Stars scored a clearly illegal goal to win Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals on Buffalo’s home ice, and the NHL didn’t have the guts to reverse the call, happen.

Moments like “The Drive” happen, when John Elway drove the Denver Broncos the length of the field to tie the Browns at the end regulation the 1987 AFC Championship Game, a game the Broncos, of course, went on to win. Or “The Fumble” happens, when Earnest Byner fumbled on his way to score a touchdown the following year to give the Broncos another win over the Browns.

Or, most painfully for me, “Wide Right” happens, when Scott Norwood missed a game-winning 47-yard field goal as time expired, giving the New York Giants Super Bowl XXV.

Watching on television, you could feel the misery and hear the groans coming from the depths of every Canucks fan standing inside Rogers Arena last night once Boston forward Patrice Bergeron scored late in the first period, knowing that this was the moment they had been dreading ever since the Bruins forced a Game 7.

Once Brad Marchand put the Bruins up 2-0 midway through the second period, you were almost sure the Canucks had no chance. And then, a few minutes later, you were 100 percent sure after Bergeron scored his second goal of the game – shorthanded, no less – and that was that.

It was a sobering thing to watch, having personally lived through it. Somebody who grew up a fan of the Yankees, or the Lakers or Celtics, or the Steelers or Cowboys can’t really understand what it’s like. Sure, those cities have had other teams suffer through depressing losses, but there’s nothing like an entire city knowing that all of its teams are cursed, have the chips stacked against them before they even begin the game.

It’s a unifying force, as well as a depressing one. It’s also one I’d never wish on another sports fan. That’s why I couldn’t help but feel for Canucks fans, why I couldn’t help but pull for Vancouver to win the Cup this year, and finally give those fans the release they’ve been waiting decades to enjoy.

Instead it’s back to the drawing board, back to another brutally long summer. Then, once next season rolls around, they’ll pack Rogers Arena again and begin to get their hopes up, just like the fans in Buffalo and Cleveland do year after year.

Only, in the end, those fans all know the way it’s going to end. But that doesn’t keep them from holding out hope that one day, maybe, possibly, they’ll be wrong. And what a glorious day that will be.

Everyone expects LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to win at least one, if not several championships together in Miami. Jason Kidd had already remarkably led the New Jersey Nets to back-to-back Finals in 2002-03, and now, with his Hall of Fame resume intact, was just a member of Nowitzki’s deep supporting cast, along with Tyson Chandler, Shawn Marion and Jason Terry.

But for Nowitzki, these Finals were everything. A chance to redeem himself from the 2006 Finals, when he and the Mavericks let a late lead in Game 3 – and a 2-0 series lead – slip away and lose the series in six games. He then lost in the first round three of the last four years, including the dramatic upset of the top-seeded Mavericks by Baron Davis and the Golden State Warriors in 2007.

Now, after a brilliant performance through the first three rounds of this year’s playoffs, Nowitzki found himself in a position to forever alter his legacy – something that, after the Mavericks’ recent playoff failures, something that seemed like an impossibility just a couple of months ago.

Of course, Nowitzki managed to do just that, playing brilliantly again throughout the series and leading the Mavericks to their first-ever championship, and one of the bigger upsets in Finals history. So now, with the Finals over – and, unfortunately, with a lockout looming that could wipe out much, if not all, of next season – it’s the perfect time to assess just where Dirk ranks among the greatest players in the history of the league:

By Geography

It’s pretty safe to say that Dirk has established himself as the greatest European player in the history of the league before this title, but the significance of him breaking through and becoming the first to lead his team to an NBA title cannot be overstated. Harvey Araton, the brilliant columnist from the New York Times, made a very compelling argument in a column leading up to Game 6 that Dwyane Wade and LeBron James wouldn’t have poked so much fun at Nowitzki for being sick if he wasn’t European.

The clear myth that a European wasn’t tough enough to lead his team to a championship also was shattered, as Nowitzki stood toe-to-toe with Wade, James and Bosh and took the title they all wanted from them, despite lacking the “second-star” that title teams traditionally have. You have to go all the way back to the 1994 and ’95 Finals, when Hakeem Olajuwon led the Rockets to consecutive titles, to find a time when a transcendent star led his team to a championship without a second great player to rely on (the ’04 Pistons don’t count in this metric, because they had several very good players; you certainly wouldn’t put Chauncey Billups, Rasheed Wallace, Rip Hamilton or Ben Wallace anywhere near Nowitzki’s status).

Among international players, Nowitzki ranks second or third all-time, depending on your definition of a foreign-born player. If you consider Tim Duncan, who was born in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to be a foreign player, than he would rank third behind Duncan and Olajuwon. But, either way, that’s pretty good company to find yourself in.

By Position

When Bill Simmons ranked the 96 greatest players in the league’s history in “The Book of Basketball,” which was released in 2009, Nowitzki ranked, in his eyes, as the seventh-best power forward in the history of the league, behind Kevin McHale, Kevin Garnett, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Bob Pettit and Duncan.

In the intervening two seasons, Dirk has made two more All-NBA second teams and, this past season, shot the highest percentage of his career from the field (just under 52 percent) and was the best player in this year’s playoffs, averaging 27.7 points, 8.5 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game.

With this year’s championship now burnishing his credentials, Nowitzki clearly moves past McHale, Garnett, Barkley and Malone, in my eyes. McHale was a great player, for sure, but his career was shorter, and he never led his team to a championship. Garnett did finally get a ring, and he was a heck of a player, but you could never count on him to get you a basket in a clutch situation. Same thing goes for Malone, who never could quite get it done when it mattered.

Barkley might be the most underrated guy of this group – he went toe-to-toe with Jordan in the ’93 Finals, which will always stand out in my mind because it is one of the first series that I vividly remember. And if Kevin Johnson had given him some help in that series, Barkley’s Suns may well have won it, and who knows where he’s ranked on this list.

But, at the end of the day, he didn’t win a ring, and Dirk did. That’s the dividing line between the two of them.

I actually would put Pettit behind all of these guys. He had a terrific career, to be sure, but he falls into the same category as George Mikan – fantastic players when they played, but if their careers started five years later, they simply don’t have the same impact that they did when they played.

So that leaves Duncan, and Dirk doesn’t have the overall resume that Duncan has. Duncan won four titles – and was his team’s best player each time – won two MVPs, and was considered a top five player in the league for a solid decade (from 1998 through 2008). He may be tailing off now as he’s reaching his mid-to-late 30s, but that doesn’t change what he’s done throughout his career.

Still, ranking as the second-best power forward of all-time isn’t too shabby, either.

Overall ranking

There’s a clear group that Nowitzki is a level below, consisting of the following players (in no particular order): Jordan, Larry Bird, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Oscar Robertson, Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Jerry West, Olajuwon, Shaquille O’Neal and Moses Malone.

But after those 13 players, you can make a strong case for Nowitzki against any of the next group of players: John Havlicek, Elgin Baylor, Julius Erving, Isiah Thomas, Scottie Pippen, Wade and James.

Nowitzki is ahead Wade and James at the moment. However, I’d say both Wade and James will end up passing him down the road – assuming they do what we all think they will in Miami, and Nowitzki doesn’t get any more rings. But that’s a different argument.

As for the remaining players – Havlicek, Baylor, Erving, Thomas and Pippen – Nowitzki ranks ahead of all of them but Baylor. Erving, despite their vastly different styles, is a lot like Nowitzki, in that both came up short plenty of times in the postseason. But he never led an NBA team to a championship, so I put Nowitzki ahead of him.

The closest choice is between he and Pippen. But, at the end of the day, I give the edge to Dirk because he led his team to two separate trips to the Finals, as well as winning a title. Pippen is one of most interesting players I have ever seen, and I always enjoyed watching him play, but in his one big shot to lead the team after Jordan left, he couldn’t get past Patrick Ewing’s Knicks in the Eastern Conference semifinals, whereas Nowitzki led his team to the Finals twice, and won a title.

That would put Nowitzki around 15^th all-time, or at least comfortably in the top 20, depending on how you would personally rank that second-half of those top 20 or so players. But there’s no question that Nowitzki has earned his place in that rarified air after one of the most impressive postseason runs in the last 20 years.

Not bad for a guy who, six weeks ago, was considered to be one of the sport’s perennial underachievers on the biggest stage.

But even then, with just 12 minutes separating the Heat from an inglorious ending to what was supposed to be the season that kick-started a dynasty, you expected them to make a run. With LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, the Heat are more capable of scoring quickly than any team in the league, as they proved repeatedly by taking over the end of games repeatedly to beat the Celtics and Bulls on their way to the Finals.

But as the fourth quarter began to wind down, as Jason Terry and Dirk Nowitzki began making shot after shot, as the Mavericks kept finding a way to get a hand on loose balls, even if only to tip them out to one of their teammates on the perimeter, you slowly began to realize what was happening: the Miami Heat, in the biggest game of their season – and for most of the players involved, easily the biggest game of their entire lives – were quitting before our very eyes.

This became wildly apparent in the final minute of play when, after Wade bricked a 3-pointer to leave the Heat down by nine with 52 seconds to go, the Heat simply allowed the Mavericks to hold the ball until the shot clock had all but run out, before Jason Kidd hit a cutting Nowitzki for a layup to officially start the victory celebration with about 30 seconds left.

It was a stunning collapse for a team that had promised so much when it was created just 11 months earlier. When this Heat team was created last summer, it threatened to do a lot of things. Last July, in their ridiculous premature championship celebration in the very same arena where they gave up Sunday night, LeBron James said the Heat would win six titles. At Carmelo Anthony’s New York wedding later that month, he told Anthony and Chris Paul that the only way they’d be able to compete for a ring was to copy them, and bail from their current teams to play with Amar’e Stoudemire on the Knicks.

But once the season started, they kept proving all season long the thing that would prove to be their fatal flaw: they are front-runners. Sure, they may be the most talented front-runners the league has ever seen, but the label still fits. Before the Celtics foolishly dealt Kendrick Perkins and irreparably harmed their “Ubuntu” mantra, they easily dealt with the Heat three times. The Bulls beat them all three times in the regular season.

If Rajon Rondo hadn’t dislocated his elbow in the Eastern Conference semifinals, the Celtics may have managed to win that series anyway, even after the Perkins trade and the inevitable injuries to Shaquille O’Neal robbed them of the backbone of toughness they relied so heavily upon. If the Bulls hadn’t fallen apart down the stretch in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, had gone up 2-0 on the Heat heading back to Miami, who knows what would have happened in that series.

In both cases, though, the Heat managed to get ahead of both teams, and once they did, they never looked back. Then, in an odd way, the Heat made the same mistake in the fourth quarter Game 2 of the Finals, when Wade and James began shadowboxing in front of the Dallas bench after Wade’s corner 3-pointer with about eight minutes left put Miami up by 15, and seemingly in control of the series.

Only the Mavericks, a team full of outcasts and players whose careers were either forgotten or left for dead, weren’t going to go away quietly, or be intimidated by the talent and athleticism of the Heat, as the Celtics and Bulls clearly were. Instead, the Mavericks kept getting up, kept coming after these Heat. They kept testing the Heat’s three stars, kept making shots, kept hurling insults at them. The Mavericks were the first team that got up from the Heat’s first big punch, tapped gloves and fought back.

And, looking back on the series, you can see how it happened. What did Terry, Shawn Marion and DeShawn Stevenson have to lose? No one expected them to be there – as the Mavs kept reminding everyone, no one expected them to beat the Trail Blazers in the first round. Certainly no one expected them to beat these Heat, with their triumvirate of stars clearly too much for Nowitzki to take on alone.

Only he wasn’t alone; far from it, in fact. More important than being surrounded by star players, he was surrounded by players that weren’t afraid of the moment. Guys like Terry, who, like Nowitzki, was desperate to erase the haunting memories of watching this same Heat franchise celebrate on their home court five years earlier. Guys like Marion, who was thought to have nothing left, only to enjoy a renaissance this year, and especially during these playoffs. Guys like J.J. Barea, who became an unstoppable dynamo in these playoffs, who you could argue was the difference in the series; after he replaced Stevenson in the starting lineup prior to Game 4, the Mavericks never lost again.

As for the Heat, a team built with stars so, in theory, it wouldn’t need role players like Terry, Marion and Barea, they needed all three of their stars to step up when it mattered. But, in Game 6, none of them did. For the fifth straight game, James was mostly absent in the fourth quarter, while Wade was firing up one miss after another when he wasn’t turning the ball over, and Bosh seemed terrified to shoot the ball the few times he found it in his hands.

At the time, it was a shocking end for a team created with so much fanfare, so many self-imposed expectations. But it was that fanfare, those expectations that, in the end, is what did the Heat in. James, Wade and Bosh thought all they needed to do was step onto the court and their opponents would cede the title to them.

The scary thing is that it almost worked. Before the Finals, only the Philadelphia 76ers truly stood up to them, but the young Sixers simply didn’t have enough talent to knock off the Heat, no matter how hard they played.

Not only did the Mavericks have that toughness, they had the closer that the Heat’s other opponents lacked. Nowitzki is as clutch a player late in games as anyone in the league, and with his impossible-to-defend fadeaway jumpers, ability to get to the rim and never miss a foul shot, he’s an impossible matchup.

Nowitzki was terrible for those first 36 minutes last night, but down the stretch, he did what everyone expected he would – he carried those Mavericks over the finish line. He finished with 10 fourth quarter points Sunday night, giving him 62 for the series.

James and Wade combined for the same amount.

In a nutshell, that sums up the NBA Finals. In a series full of close games, the Mavericks had the resolve to make the plays they needed to down the stretch of games. When they fell behind, they had the ability, the will, the belief to rally back and make a game of it. When the Heat fell behind, they ceded the game.

“I just think this is a win for team basketball,” Dirk Nowitzki said afterwards, summing the situation up perfectly, wearing the baseball cap with “Champions” scrawled across the front of it that never quite fit right on his head. “This is a win for playing as a team on both ends of the floor, for sharing the ball, for passing the ball, and we’ve been doing that all season long.”

As if his play on the court didn’t sum up just how far LeBron James is from becoming an NBA champion, his comments afterwards made it crystal clear. When James was asked how he felt about so many people being happy he and his teammates lost, his answer was stunning in today’s politically correct society, where no one ever says anything inflammatory.

“Absolutely not,” he said, with a hint of a smirk crossing his lips. “Because, at the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today … they have the same personal problems they had today.

“I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family, and be happy about that. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to real world at some point.”

And with that answer, LeBron James summed up why he’s in the position he’s in now, with the vast majority of the people not only happy that he and the Heat lost, but impossibly thrilled by it. Only someone that myopic, that convinced that the entire world revolves around his every move, could say something so shallow, so condescending, so callous. Only someone that self-centered could think it was a good idea to go on national television to announce to the world not that he is going to play for the Miami Heat, but that he is going to, “Take his talents to South Beach.”

Now with an NBA lockout looming, it could be a long, long time before we see LeBron James and that No. 6 Miami Heat jersey on a basketball court again. It will give him a lot of time to think about these last 11 months, to reflect back on the path he’s taken, to see how he’s landed in this position. But he won’t think that way. How could he? He’s got the life all of those miserable fans want, doesn’t he?

No, LeBron James will go home and drive his uber-expensive cars and fly around on his private jet and live his fabulous life. But what he won’t have is the championship that he was so sure he had already won when he signed up to become Wade’s sidekick last summer.

Like those miserable little fans at home who were happy about his team’s defeat, LeBron James will wake up every day for at least the next 12 months with the same problem that he’s had for his entire NBA career: he’ll still be waiting for his first NBA championship.

But no one – and I mean no one – could ever have hoped, or even dreamed, that the final chapters of this story would play out quite like this.

There will be other players that go down in history as being better than LeBron James. He sealed that fate for himself, lost any chance he had to lay claim to the “Greatest Of All Time” moniker when he chose to, as he put it, “Take his talents to South Beach” and join Dwayne Wade’s team, instead of going out and beating him – and everyone else – on the court. But you can make a strong case that James is the most compelling player the league has ever seen.

Until this season, he was at least everyone’s second-favorite player, if not their favorite. I don’t know anyone who didn’t like him before the events of last July ran their course. They all loved the way he played as much as the off-court persona he had created and honed to perfection. Here he was, the hometown kid, trying to lift lowly, forgotten Cleveland – the city that could never get out of its own way when it came to its sports teams – to a championship. And the way he did it, with the ball-handling skills of Jason Kidd combined with the body of Karl Malone, allowed him to do things that have never been seen on a basketball court.

But then last summer happened and, suddenly, everything changed. Outside of the peninsula of South Florida, fans around the country turned on James en masse. The man who once was cheered voraciously wherever he went instead found every opposing arena turned into a scorpion’s lair when he and the Heat came to town. Casual fans, or even people who weren’t fans of the league at all, took glee whenever the Heat lost, and were at least disappointed, if not saddened, whenever they won.

After some initial struggles, the Heat began to figure things out, to slowly, but surely, find a rhythm. They didn’t win 70 games, as some had claimed they would, but they did wind up with the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference by the end of the regular season. At that point, people were sure the Heat would lose to either the Celtics or the Bulls, were sure that they wouldn’t make it out of the Eastern Conference, were sure that this conglomerate of star power wouldn’t be rewarded so quickly. People felt especially confident about that after the Heat struggled mightily to vanquish the lowly Philadelphia 76ers in five games in the first round of the playoffs.

But then, just when the Celtics started to get things figured out in the Eastern Conference semifinals, point guard Rajon Rondo dislocated his elbow. Suddenly, the Celtics found themselves running at half-speed, their engine deprived of much of its horsepower, and they quickly, and quietly, went away in five games.

Then it was on to the Eastern Conference Finals, where the Bulls who surely would knock the Heat off their perch, a hard-nosed physical team led by the league’s Most Valuable Player this season, point guard Derrick Rose, a team that willed its way to the league’s best record thanks to what Charles Barkley called, “the best defense I have ever seen.”

And it looked like that would be the case after the Heat were torched in the first game of the series, losing the opener in Chicago by 20 points. Instead, it was James who guarded Rose down the stretch of games, who combined with Wade to make an awe-inspiring run to close out Game 5 in Chicago. It looked like the Heat, after months of searching, had finally found the right formula. Udonis Haslem returned to the lineup after missing most of the season due to injury in Game 2, and immediately gave the Heat a physical presence off the bench, something they sorely missed and desperately needed. Mike Miller, after dealing with various injuries all season long, finally began playing well, too, giving them the depth they had been lacking for the vast majority of the season.

So it was with this backdrop that the Heat entered the NBA Finals for a rematch of the 2006 series with the Dallas Mavericks – even if there were only a handful of players still on both teams from that series.

The Mavericks, in many ways, are the anti-Heat. Miami’s stars plotted their course and chose to play with one another. They thought this way the best way for them to win championships. Dallas, on the other hand, is more like the Island of Misfit Toys, a team full of cast-offs and bargain bin players, almost all of whom nearly won titles in the past, but never quite had enough to win it all.

Players like Kidd, one of the greatest point guards of all-time who willed the New Jersey Nets to back-to-back Finals appearances in the early 2000s, an achievement that probably never will be given the credit it deserves. Players like Shawn Marion, who starred as part of Steve Nash’s offensive attack in Phoenix, earning the nickname “The Matrix” for his freakish athletic ability, but who had since passed through Toronto and Miami before landing with the Mavericks. Players like Tyson Chandler, once a top-three pick in the NBA Draft but who Michael Jordan essentially gave to Dallas last summer for Erick Dampier’s non-guaranteed contract. Players like J.J. Barea, who looks like he stepped on to the court straight out of a rec league at the local YMCA, and DeShawn Stevenson, a salary throw-in acquired in a trade for center Brendan Haywood last year who has turned himself into the 2011 version of Bruce Bowen – a player capable of playing lockdown defense and hitting the corner three.

So it was this group of drifters, this band of not-quite-there’s and what-ifs, who all came to Dallas in one way or another to join forces behind the team’s lone star, Dirk Nowitzki, the sweetest-shooting 7-footer of all-time, and make one last run at that ever-elusive ring. How was this group supposed to combat the speed, strength and might of Miami’s trio of stars and its deepening bench? How was this group going to hold back what seemed like an unstoppable wave that seemed destined to crash over the NBA, to officially crown King James and give him his elusive first ring?

But, somehow, that’s exactly what these Mavericks have done. They’ve gotten one brilliant performance after another from Nowitzki, their egoless star who shoots from angles that all of us fruitlessly try to repeat to win trick-shot competitions – only he makes them with ease. They’ve gotten savvy veteran leadership from Kidd, who hit the biggest shot of his career with 90 seconds remaining in last night’s 112-103 win in Game 5 to put away the game, clutch scoring in the fourth quarter from Jason Terry and bursts of energy and scoring from Barea. They’ve gotten timely shooting and quality defense from Stevenson, who’s done an admirable job on James, as well as defense, rebounding and unexpected scoring from Marion and Chandler.

It’s taken a true team effort from Dallas to carve out a 3-2 lead in this forever series, one that constantly shifts back-and-forth, possession-by-possession, each team taking turns feeling out the other. One team will get hit hard with a punch, only to stop, gather itself, and return fire. It’s basketball being played at its highest level, in its truest form, leaving fans on the edge of their seats from the beginning to end of each game, only to immediately start counting the minutes until the next time the two teams take the floor.

And, really, this is the way it should be ending. The Heat tried to deconstruct the tried-and-true model of building a champion, instead building a team from scratch and all at once, thinking that its trio of stars would be good enough to overcome whatever was thrown their way. The Mavericks, on the other hand, have been building this team for years, slowly acquiring more and more pieces, until they made their own move that pushed them over the top last summer when they acquired Chandler.

So now, with their backs firmly against the wall, LeBron James and the Heat head back to South Beach, where the world will reconvene on Sunday night to see whether this story will play out even longer, right down to the absolute last game possible, or if the Mavericks will somehow, someway, find a way to hold back what seemed, just a few days ago, a tide that was about to sweep across the NBA landscape, ushering in a new era for the league and finally giving King James a true crown and his first championship.

After the way this year began, with James and Wade and Chris Bosh preening and dancing and celebrating last July like they’d already won a title before they’d even had a single practice together, where else could this story really end? The Heat couldn’t have been knocked out in the Eastern Conference semifinals or finals; they couldn’t win or lose the NBA Finals in Dallas. No, this truly seemed, from the beginning, to be destined to end back where it all began. Back on the shores of Biscayne Bay, where James and Wade and Bosh already began planning their parade route last summer.

This was what LeBron James asked for when he announced he was taking his talents to South Beach. This is what he said he wanted. Now, it’s time to see if he’s up to the challenge. It’s back to Miami one more time, back to Miami for the only ending this season ever could have.

Back to Miami for the end of a forever series, one that’s a fitting finale to a forever season.

Then I saw this tweet from the National Post’s terrific sports columnist, Bruce Arthur: ”Nathan Horton looks like he got hit by Mike Tyson, in his prime. Eyes flickering. Christ.”

After that, I wasn’t so upset that I’d missed Monday’s game, which saw Horton, a forward for the Boston Bruins, get knocked out cold on a vicious cheap shot in the middle of the ice by Vancouver defenseman Aaron Rome.

It’s the same old story with hockey, the same tired back-and-forth that seems to play out once a week now. One player takes a cheap shot on another, hits him in the head and gives him a concussion. Then a debate ensues about whether or not the hit was legal, whether or not it was a cheap shot, whether or not it was right.

But none of that addresses the true problem with the sport moving forward: now that concussions aren’t a dirty little secret anymore, the game either needs to change, or risk becoming irrelevant.

***

Even after the Rome hit on Horton Monday night, I was looking forward to watching Game 4 of the series last night. Then, after I turned on Versus at 8 p.m., I got sick to my stomach.

In the network’s open to the broadcast, it showed the hit multiple times, showed Horton not moving on the ice, showed him getting carted off the ice. It actually used the phrase, “Win For Horton,” followed by “Win For Boston.”

This is just one way that hockey has to change. It needs to stop glorifying these hits, using them to attract interest like those rubberneckers driving by a wreck, straining to see if anyone survived.

During last night’s broadcast, Mike Milbury (who clearly is an objective commentator on this series, since he spent his entire career playing for the Bruins) called Vancouver’s superstar brothers, Henrik and Daniel Sedin, “Thelma and Louise,” as he wasn’t impressed with their physicality during the first two periods of last night’s game. Never mind that they’re two of the 10 best players in the league – go out there and try to kill someone!

It’s this mindset that threatens the future of hockey. The league’s signature player, Sidney Crosby, missed most of the season after suffering from concussion symptoms for the remainder of the season after taking head shots from Washington’s David Steckel on New Year’s Day and Tampa Bay’s Victor Hedman four days later. One of Crosby’s predecessor’s as the top player in the game, Eric Lindros, say his career irrevocably changed because of multiple concussions, as did Pat LaFontaine before him.

But none of that seems to make any difference to the “hardcore” hockey fan. They don’t care if these players go away. Maybe they consider it a “casualty of war,” or something as equally absurd as that.

Personally, as a fan of the game, I do care. I care a lot. I don’t watch hockey to see if any of the players are going to try to decapitate one another. I watch the game because, when played well, it’s a wonderful spectacle to behold.

One of the best games I have seen in a long time came in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals between Boston and the Tampa Bay Lightning. It was a tense, hard-fought affair, with neither team scoring until, ironically enough, Nathan Horton deflected the puck past Lightning goalie Dwayne Roloson with less than eight minutes to go in the third period.

For 60 minutes, those two teams laid everything on the line, and there wasn’t a single penalty called. Not because the referees were letting them play with impunity, but because there wasn’t a reason to make a call. It was just two teams going back and forth, up and down the ice, going all out in the hopes of continuing to have a shot at a championship.

That is what hockey should be aspiring to. Not sickening cheap shots like the one Rome took on Horton Monday night. There has been talk about broadening “Rule 48″ in the National Hockey League’s rulebook to outlaw any head shots. But that was shot down earlier this spring by Brendan Shanahan – a future Hall of Famer who recently was put in charge of the NHL’s disciplinary program. “I don’t think it’s realistic,” Shanahan told reporters at the NHL’s GM meeting this spring. “Defenders defend standing up, and forwards attack bent over. There are other things we can do first.”

There may be other things the NHL can do first, but that doesn’t mean they are the right things. For the good of the game, the league should get rid of head shots all together, and allow the immense skill and talent of its players to shine through. Unfortunately, the men running the league come from another era, one where players like Henrik and Daniel Sedin are likened to “Thelma and Louise” for not being tough enough.

Soon, tough guys might be the only ones playing hockey. And, if that happens, I won’t be watching.