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Especially in today's game where significant changes have made the NHL safer, more entertaining and, at times, unrecognizably genteel to the players from Detroit and Colorado behind the legendary Fight Night at the Joe. And when the puck finally dropped, the scale of the violence and chaos - 18 fighting majors, 148 total penalty minutes, the ice soaked with blood, some of it from the goaltenders - was unlike anything the NHL had ever seen, before or since. The high-stakes revenge game, featuring nine future Hall of Famers, had been simmering for nearly a year, ramped up by bus brawls, sucker punches, horrific injuries, heart-breaking losses, bomb-sniffing dogs and non-stop psychological warfare between the two fan bases. The epicenter of the rivalry was March 26, 1997, a game held inside Detroit's old Joe Louis Arena that has become known in hockey lore as Fight Night at the Joe. "I was like, you're not serious, right? I can't stand Ohio State but nobody on their team ever tried to kill one of my teammates." "I'm a University of Michigan fan and somebody said, Who do you hate more, Ohio State or the Colorado Avalanche?" says former Red Wings trainer John Wharton. Indeed, during that glorious seven-season run, the Wings and Avs met four times a year during the regular season and five more times during the post-season while managing to bring out the best - and the worst - in each other in ways only the Red Sox and Yankees and Celtics and Lakers had ever done before. Avs claim first Cup since '01 Makar playoff MVP."That's what made this whole thing so beautiful: the hate, and what was at stake." Editor's Picks
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"Red Wings - Avalanche was just pure old-school, deep-seated hatred between two teams and two cities," says McCarty, the mercurial forward who became one of the rivalry's iconic figures. To this day the scars the two rivals inflicted upon each other serve as a kind of road map to the epic stretch between 19 that resulted in three Stanley Cups for the Wings and two for the Avalanche. There's a similar keepsake on Adam Foote's forehead, another one bisecting Patrick Roy's right eyebrow and even a slight indentation remains on Kris Draper's cheek. Twenty-five years after the Wings and Avs were locked in a fantastic, relentless and breathtakingly violent winner-take-all battle for NHL supremacy, Avs enforcer Claude Lemieux still likes to point out the prodigious bump on his skull left by Darren McCarty's knee. THE GREATEST RIVALRY in hockey history left quite a mark on the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche.