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What may be hockey's best quality is that there's a singular beauty to the game no matter the level at which it's played. When I'm out there late Wednesday nights playing in the IHL (the Ibuprofen Hockey League), there is a considerable amount of cherry picking, slack backchecking, inadvertent tripping and unprovoked falling down – and I'm responsible for a lot of it. But there is also much to marvel at. Some of the players are genuinely talented, guys who can really accelerate turning in both directions, who can dangle through traffic, who can put the puck tape to tape on cross-ice passes in full flight.

Even in our colonial shinny outpost situated at the remote outer edge of the vast hockey empire, there are moments when I think, “Wow, that was pretty damn good.”

It's the same everywhere – when I watch hockey of any level, it almost always manages to look extraordinary to me because it's simply an inherently thrilling and dazzling game, a game of speed, skill, touch, instinct. There are few things in sport more simultaneously elegant and exciting than a gifted hockey player carrying the puck in full flight.

Which is why it rankles me year after year that violence (which is not the same thing as toughness) is seen by so many to be a central plank of the game. I find that point of view objectionable, and at the risk of having to enter the CSIS witness protection program, I will go on record to say that I think the Don Cherry attitude has done the game damage. With his semi-coherent ramblings on manhood and machismo and fisticuffs, he and those of like mind have taken the lowest common denominator and used it as their ceiling.

The NHL brass don't help matters much, either, Sean Avery's recent six-game suspension being a perfect example. He's an idiot, but a six-game suspension for remarks about his ex is much harsher than the one- to- three-game suspensions the league regularly doles out for hits from behind, hits that could so easily end a player's career and which regularly result in trips to the hospital.

The NHL implicitly condones violence and probably has no trouble with Mr. Cherry, who has somehow managed to make thuggishness emblematically Canadian. Given his inexplicable influence among young viewers, that ought to sadden us.

It ought to sadden us mostly because it's so unnecessary. Hockey, at any level, does not need violence to be intense and exciting. It's exciting when I lace 'em up Wednesday nights in the IHL, and it was exciting a week ago, when we lucked into some tickets for the Oilers against the Dallas Stars. They were good seats, 15 rows up in the middle of the rink. It was close enough that we could hear the players shout to one another for the puck, but far enough away that the game was apprehensible in a way only mid-distance can provide.

What was so striking about the Edmonton/Dallas tilt, however, was how intense it was, how physical it got, while remaining resolutely non-violent. Don't get me wrong: There was toughness, checking, body crunching. But there was no blatant hooliganism, no dirty play. And, crucially, there was not a single fight.

This matters because all of us model in one way or another off the pros – especially kids. If goonery continues to be rewarded in the bigs, you can be sure it will forever keep trickling down.

Hockey can and should be physical, of course, given the close confines and the speed and size of the players. Some of the game's most gripping moments come out of physical play. The open-ice hit is one of them, in which a player prancing through the neutral zone with his head down gets creamed by a roving defenceman. The point of the open-ice hit, though, is that it emerges naturally from the flow of the game. It's not violence; it's an organic, integral part of the game. It's not premeditated. It's not fighting, or brawling, or scrapping, or hacking, or spearing.

Having taken such a relatively Ghandiesque stance, I feel compelled to admit that fighting is part of my hockey past.

It was the final game of the university interclub league, my final organized game of hockey, in fact. Our team, The Puck Stops Here, was dead last in the league, but we scored the first goal of the game, not 30 seconds in. Our joy was short-lived. The other team scored 13 goals in a row before we potted the game's final goal.

With just a few seconds left, my partner on defence, my close friend Rich, who is now a law professor, nodded to me. I nodded back. We dropped the gloves and jumped one another, flailing around, swearing, tossing wildly exaggerated haymakers meant to miss. The ref stopped play but was deeply confused.

The rest of our squad knew their duty; they cleared the bench and it was a brawl, all from the same team, all faking it. The other team stood mute, perplexed. It was a blissful, idiotic celebration of how bad we were and was the only way to end such a dismal season.

Nothing close to that happened last week between the Oilers and the Stars. Sitting in Row 15, watching great players on good ice, I was reminded again of what I so often feel watching my buddies zip up and down the ice, or even watching my two daughters as they learn to stickhandle: This is one great sport, and it can be great without dirty hits, without fights, without premeditated violence. None of that has anything to do with hockey.

If all that other stuff is what you enjoy, you're the one they invented mixed martial arts for. I'm not going to hold it against you for liking it. Just stop trying to pollute my sport with it.

Curtis Gillespie's most recent book is the novel Crown Shyness.