It is a fear palpable throughout the NHL, a concern that can be dismissed as nostalgia for an era gone by but also touches a sensitive nerve with more than a few athletes and coaches.

	Tie Domi has the offensive ability to survive in the skill game.

The worry to some faced with the realities of a new NHL, one that might be a more skillful league but also appears more peaceful, is that this is a process that could rob the league of its color and personality.

It's a belief rooted in the forceful, sometimes brutal and often controversial figures that are sprinkled throughout NHL history, hard-bitten and sometimes violent men from John Ferguson to Leo Boivin to Bobby Baun, from Bobby Clarke to Clark Gillies to Dave Semenko, from Tim Hunter to Marty McSorley to Dale Hunter.

It is a rogue's brigade of blood-and-guts warriors who represented a sizeable slice of the game's mentality and made hockey's overall personality different from that of the other major sports. To these athletes, justice was meted out on the ice, often with fists and sometimes with sticks, and molded a game in which overtimes of Stanley Cup playoff games were typified by utter lawlessness bordering on mayhem.

Gary Bettman's administration, it would seem, has made a philosophical 90-degree turn this season, choosing to give the game back to the more talented players after years in which grinders and goons ruled in a sport that de-emphasized skill and saw its offensive numbers dwindle to near record lows.

A crackdown on interference and obstruction has triggered an unforeseen new standard for virtually all varieties of fouls and, most significantly, reduced fighting to historically low levels.

Indeed, with an average of only six fights per 10 games, the "art" of fighting on skates seems to be on the verge of total extinction, with the game's enforcers an endangered species as the league veers towards a game characterized by speed and skill rather than muscle and aggression.

When Eric Lindros was benched recently by the New York Rangers after incurring a costly minor penalty, however, his comments expressed the view that suggests the league has headed down a slippery slope toward a less appealing product.

"Hockey is a contact sport," he said. "I understand what they are trying to do, but it's tough to play the game this way."

Mario Lemieux, of course, is loving the league's new approach. Yet No. 66 speculated recently that smaller goaltending equipment would juice goal scoring even more and produce a more attractive, offensively enhanced game. At a time when U.S. television partners are assessing their future relationship with the NHL, it is clear that more entertainment is needed.

But what should that entertainment look like?

Should it be a high-speed, low contact game like the annual All-Star tilts in which double figures in goals are expected? Or, as Hockey Night in Canada's star commentator Don Cherry would argue, would a return to a game in which fighting, brawling and hardnosed play are championed produce a game that would bring fans out of their seats and increase television numbers exponentially?

Should the game be designed so that diminutive sorts like Tampa's Martin St. Louis can flourish? Or is the power forward typified by Lindros and Todd Bertuzzi, athletes who can scrap and drive to the net, the type of player who should be highlighted?

Or is four-on-four, run-and-shoot hockey the undeniable wave of the future?

The answer, it would seem, lies in none of these extremes. It lies in sculpting a game that rewards both skill and grit, but one that doesn't permit the less talented to employ a lax interpretation of the rules to erase the impact of the more talented.

Indeed, while many decry the absence of hitting in the early part of the NHL season, the reality is that body checking is an acquired skill that combines speed, timing and balance, qualities that once made medium-sized Bryan Trottier one of the NHL's most feared hitters.

Goon tactics and the explosion of obstruction-style hockey, however, both destroyed the ability of players to effectively alter the course of games with smart body checking and, ultimately, rotted away at the ability of many players to use the body efficiently.

Instead of skating and hitting with the shoulder, players learned to hook, water-ski and hold. The presence of enforcers, meanwhile, forced players who could hit to answer to fistic challenges night after night, gradually providing less and less motivation to body-check.

This season, some of the most prolific fighters in recent history have seen their gloves hit the ice with a surprising lack of frequency. Players such as Georges Laraque, Chris Simon, Tie Domi and Donald Brashear are not nearly as active in the pugilism department as in previous years.

If not for the rockhead intent of youngsters such as Kevin Sawyer, Eric Boulton and Jody Shelley to rise in the ranks of NHL heavyweights, fighting stats would be even lower.

These are players, of course, who could not play in the league if not for their ability to beat people up. That's how they got to the league, with a willingness to fight with abandon at the slightest provocation, a quality that has been nurtured for decades in the Canadian junior system and rewards willing young gladiators with lucrative contracts.

While Mike Milbury has called fighting an "embarrassment" to the NHL, few general managers have publicly agreed with him. Convinced that his team and his goaltender, Dan Cloutier, were being unfairly targeted by opposing players, for example, Vancouver GM Brian Burke traded for career scrapper Darren Langdon, a player who couldn't crack Carolina's lineup in the postseason last spring.

Yet the quick faceoff rule, the inclination of most teams to ban fighting in their training camps, the reduction in obstruction of top players and the heightened competition for playoff positions has clearly reduced both the frequency and impact of fighting this season.

Fights between talented regulars, such as a lively bout earlier this season between Dallas winger Bill Guerin and Calgary sniper Jarome Iginla, will occasionally break out, but fewer and fewer teams are finding the need for full-time policemen, particularly if they lack other skills.

An intriguing contradiction is that the NHL has moved away from fighting at the same time the NHL Players Association continues to push for elimination of the instigator penalty for starting a fight. Whether this is an attempt to protect jobs or a real competitive issue for the union is unclear, but the ability of talented attackers to ply their trade with less interference and harassment certainly robs those who want to see the instigator minor eliminated of logical footing.

To some, gradually eliminating enforcers is another step down the path of altering the character of the sport after decades in which the law of the land ruled and players with missing teeth and astonishingly high pain thresholds were view as prototypical NHLers.

There will always be those who believe fighting adds to the entertainment package, and that's probably the only real argument anyone could make in retaining the presence of that element in the sport.

But the game of hockey doesn't need it, and an increased emphasis on speed and skill doesn't necessarily have to rob the NHL of its unique character. Aggression doesn't have to be all about rule-breaking and intimidation, and the clean, punishing body check remains an element that produces the raw edge this contact sport requires.

Yes, the NHL is changing. But only a lack of imagination and ambition can truly destroy the color and fabric of the game.

Damien Cox, a columnist for the Toronto Star, is a frequent contributor to ESPN.com.