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"  It was that rarest of professional hockey games, one threatened by rain. And then different clouds rolled in. The Pittsburgh Penguins were playing their archrival Washington Capitals in the Winter Classic, the NHL&amp;#039;s outdoor showcase. Young Sidney Crosby, arguably the game&amp;#039;s best player \u2014 he&amp;#039;d already amassed a league-leading thirty-two goals and sixty-five points in the season&amp;#039;s first half \u2014 turned his head to follow the puck up ice. The last moments of the second period slipped away. The rain continued to fall. Then, disaster. Washington&amp;#039;s David Steckel, following the puck with his body as well as his eyes, hit Crosby with a blind-side shoulder to the head. It seemed like an accident, more like a random collision of molecules than a body check. But Crosby still went down, flat on his back. And then he was hit again in his next game, four days later, and then his season was over, his head left swimming in ink. Only this past summer, in July, did Crosby begin skating again \u2014 and still the symptoms, and the worry, lingered. For nearly seven anxious months, he has been absent from the ice, as though Wayne Gretzky had vanished just when he was about to become the Great One. Nobody really wanted to talk about it, but a lot of us thought it: There was a chance that Sidney Crosby might never be Sidney Crosby again. And that hockey would never be the same, either. It is, at its essence, a beautiful sport, graceful and fast. It&amp;#039;s also an ascendant game in some ways, poised to benefit from basketball&amp;#039;s potentially lost season and a terrific playoffs. The Boston Bruins \u2014 an Original Six team \u2014 won the Stanley Cup. Winnipeg has the Jets again. All seems right in hockey&amp;#039;s world. But for the fact that it&amp;#039;s killing its talent. Football receives more unhappy attention for what it does to its players, but hockey&amp;#039;s been no better, and in some ways is worse, because of its velocity physics. When former tough guy Bob Probert died last year, an autopsy revealed extensive brain damage. The more recent deaths of Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien \u2014 at twenty-eight and twenty-seven, respectively \u2014 have compounded the sense of looming tragedy. Nightmares begetting nightmares. For years now, hockey has lost players to its self-generating fog, often some of its very best: Pat LaFontaine, Adam Deadmarsh, Eric Lindros, and Paul Kariya all had their careers shortened by concussions. Hockey has always continued apace, of course. Hall of Famers die, and future Hall of Famers are born. But even among the game&amp;#039;s most black-hearted fans, there has been a growing sense that enough is finally enough, that the possibility of losing a player like Sidney Crosby is too much bad news to bear. Even before last season&amp;#039;s more devastating hits \u2014 Zdeno Chara broke Max Pacioretty&amp;#039;s neck, Aaron Rome nearly decapitated Nathan Horton \u2014 the NHL had written a new rule, Rule 48, to try to cut down on head shots: &amp;quot;A lateral or blind-side hit to an opponent where the head is targeted and/or the principal point of contact is not permitted.&amp;quot; This past summer, the rule was strengthened, the qualifying language removed. But there&amp;#039;s every possibility that David Steckel could level Crosby the same way this season and the game would go on, because hockey recognizes its built-in weakness: a sport played by giants with sticks on ice at speed will occasionally damage its players. Accidents happen. Even clean hits can hurt. The game is the game. But will it always be? This season will be a defining one, the foundation of whatever future&amp;#039;s to come. In addition to the new Rule 48, Brendan Shanahan, a well-respected and well-liked former player, will be the league&amp;#039;s rookie chief disciplinarian, replacing the sometimes overly subjective Colin Campbell. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re trying to walk a delicate line,&amp;quot; Shanahan said over the phone this summer, when asked how much he expected hockey to change under his watch. &amp;quot;We want to keep the game&amp;#039;s fair physicality and at the same time make it safer than it&amp;#039;s been. Bottom line, I want to see a drop in the number of concussions our players experience and in the number of games they miss because of them. &amp;quot;Popularity is not my goal. Transparency is. Clarity is.&amp;quot; Clarity is. And so with any luck, Crosby will soon be in uniform again. But the damage, like the past, can&amp;#039;t be fully erased. He will still have a shadow on his brain; he will still be just a push-button hit away from another season on the shelf. Will he play differently? Tentatively? Carefully? Will other players shy away from him, not wanting to play the villain, or will they go after him, because villainy is what they want most in the world? Will Brendan Shanahan and Rule 48 be enough to save Sidney Crosby from the game he loves? Will they be enough to save the game from itself? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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