Minnesota high school hockey culture is, at times, brutal. What’s euphemistically called “chirping” is variously rude, scatological, misogynistic, thin-skinned, and profane. The f-word is inserted by some on the ice and in tweets as adjective, verb, and noun. Insulting the other teams’ skill, appearance, girlfriends, economic status, masculinity, or parentage is de rigueur. Yet one can’t judge these 16-to-18-year-olds too harshly; there’s a lot of that snottiness going around from people old enough to know better.

So it was a pleasant surprise to witness what happened after the state championship game last weekend. The story is my latest column for Forbes.