Hockey wonders why it isn’t embraced by mainstream sports fans. The answer was lying just the other night in a pool of blood on the ice in Vancouver.

The NHL threw the book at Vancouver star Todd Bertuzzi, suspending him for the rest of the regular season and playoffs, after he laid a shot on Steve Moore of the Avalanche that was cheaper than a New York street vendor’s collection of watches. Not that it will do any good. The league could throw the Library of Congress at him and it won’t change anything.

It won’t because Bertuzzi isn’t the problem. He’s only a symptom of a sport that is so steeped in a culture of violence that there are no doubt both fans and players who think that what Bertuzzi did wasn’t all that bad.

The problem is the code of hockey, an unwritten behavioral bible handed down from the game’s ancient days and perpetuated in the rules of the NHL. The code says that if somebody is too good, you beat him up or knock him out. The code says that you protect your skill guys by employing big guys whose only skill is swinging their fists. The code says if someone cheap shots one of your guys, you’ve got to pay him back.

I’d say it’s Neanderthal, but that would be giving cavemen a bad name they don’t deserve. So let’s just say it’s stupid. And primitive. And unworthy of a game that, when played by the best in the world, is a marvelous spectacle of speed and power and grace and contact.

By the code of hockey, Moore had it coming to him, which tells you all you need to know about the code. To be fair, it doesn’t actually specify fractured bones in his neck and jaw, a concussion, and deep facial lacerations -- a collection of injuries that will keep him off the ice for the remainder of this season, including the playoffs. But the code not only accepts but also demands that somebody on the Canucks had to make Moore pay for conferring a concussion on Vancouver star captain Markus Naslund on Feb. 16.

Moore got away with his shot, an elbow-and-shoulder shot which cut Naslund up and knocked him out for three games -- at least in that game and the next one between the two teams. But Monday night, near the end of a 9-2 Colorado win, the Canucks took their revenge. Bertuzzi, who’s been suspended before for dirty play, rabbit punched Moore, then fell on top of him as he fell to the face-first.

If Moore had gotten up from Bertuzzi’s sucker-punch, we wouldn’t even be talking about this, which is another part of the problem. Only because of all those broken bones and how close Moore came to being paralyzed did it become a major issue. And as long as the NHL judges dirty play by the amount of physical damage done, it’s never going to be anything other than what it is, a minor professional sports league that can’t figure out why it can’t make the jump to prime time.

The NHL wrung its hands over this one and will make Bertuzzi sit for the rest of the regular season and playoffs. But it won’t do the one thing that makes such incidents possible –- even necessary.

Just ban fighting and dirty play. That’s all it would take to begin to cleanse the game. There’s no fighting in college, none in international play, none anywhere but in the NHL and its farm systems. Without the fights and cheap shots and stick swinging, hockey is one of the best sports you’ll ever hope to see. With it, it’s a game that could be adequately lampooned only by “Slap Shot,” a movie whose laughs are generated by an exaggeration of hockey’s culture of goonery.

But “Slap Shot” works because it is a reflection -– though a distorted one -– of the game as practiced by the NHL. Hockey fans love it because it smacks –- and whacks, bashes, slashes, and high-sticks –- of reality.

If the NHL ran its game the right way, “Slap Shot” would have been impossible to make. It wouldn’t have been funny.

But the NHL believes in “old-time hockey,” which means you drop the gloves and beat the snot out of somebody who’s too good for you to keep up with on the ice. Eliminating fighting, the guardians of the game believe, would somehow cheapen the game.

What’s really perverse is that some people are already saying that the reason Bertuzzi laid out Moore is because the league has already gone too far in legislating against fighting. When Moore knocked out Naslund, this line of thinking –- if you can call it that –- goes, someone should have been allowed to drop the gloves and beat Moore up on the spot –- like they did in the good old days.

But doing that would have earned the perpetrator a game misconduct, so the Canucks were left with no recourse but to wait for another game and then cheap-shot him.

Apparently, it never occurred to anyone that the way to deal with Moore was to hit him hard -– and clean. And it has never occurred to the NHL that the way to deal with its image problem is to simply outlaw fighting. You drop your gloves, you’re out of this game and the next three. You cheap-shot someone -– and it shouldn’t matter if you injure him or not -– you’re out of this game and the next three.

It’s not that hard to do. It doesn’t even take courage to do. It just takes someone who cares about a beautiful and wonderful game, and not about a stupid “code.”

Someday, hockey will find that someone. The hope is that it’s soon.