College hockey is void of one thing that makes the professional game more exciting and testosterone-fueled than its younger counterpart -- fighting.

If a fight breaks out on the ice in a Div. I ACHA game, the instigators are immediately thrown out of the game and suspended for the next ACHA game.

That means that any spectator going to the Greenberg Ice Pavilion on any given weekend thinking that there is a chance that two players will drop their gloves should think again.

Last season, the Icers were involved in only one fight.

This season, things looked bleak in the fight department, until last Friday night, when all hell broke loose.

Any spectator could see that this game was a bit different. Several times throughout the game it seemed that the Icers ran square into Delaware's goalie, leaving both players sprawled out on the ice.

After this happened three separate times, the Delaware players began taking offense, but Icers coach Joe Battista insisted that it was in no way his players' fault, but rather that the Blue Hens' defenders were leaning on them and forcing them into their own goalie.

"I think our guys were going hard to the net," Battista said. "I don't teach my players to run goalies, never have, never will."

As the Icers continued to increase their lead from two goals to three and so on, the opposing Blue Hen players began taking offense to the beating at hand. They took several shots after the whistle, including two shots on Icers goalie Scott Graham.

With just under seven minutes to play in the third period, Delaware coach and former Icer Josh Brandwene sent Jake Skinner out onto the ice. Skinner played only a few shifts the entire game, but his last shift was the most questionable.

It seemed to the untrained eye that Skinner skated right to the net, and after the whistle blew he hit the first Icer whose back was to him. In one case, it was defenseman Dant Hirsch. Within seconds another Icers defenseman, Curtiss Patrick, defended his partner and the two put each other in headlocks. Moments after that, the rarest of rarities occurred, the gloves, like doves being freed from a cage, flew in the air and it was on.

"I didn't drop my gloves at first," Patrick said. "I just wanted to punch the guy a few times, but it ended up being a little more than I hoped."

Patrick and Skinner were ejected immediately and were also suspended for the next day's games, but another Icer, Neal Price, was also handed a 10-minute game misconduct penalty and was forced to leave the game.

According to Patrick and Price, Brandwene yelled to Price that the cheap shot that was applied to Hirsch was for running his goalie earlier in the game.

"[Brandwene] definitely sent that guy out there," Patrick said. "And he said that was for the three times that our goalie got hit."

While Brandwene didn't directly comment on that, he did say that hockey is an emotional game and that he and Neal hugged in the lobby after the game.

Battista didn't believe that Brandwene sent a player out just to mix things up after the whistle. He said that Delaware was a desperate team, and desperate times call for desperate measures.

"I think these were battles ... this was trench warfare," Battista said after the games. "These were games that were very important to both teams and that's the way both teams played."