There’s a line. And somebody always crosses it.

For me, it`s ice girls at NHL games. Nothing more readily demonstrates the low to which pro sports will go than dressing up a bunch of young women in bikinis and sending them out onto the ice on skates with shovels to clean up around the goalie nets during stoppages in play.

 I’m not sure who started it, but nearly every team in hockey now exploits its own ice girl squad presented in varying degrees of absurd, degrading skimpiness. Something about bare skin and ice just says kinky. Hard to resist.

It’s not as if anyone has tried (resisting, that is). Go to any pro sports game, and especially if you don’t get around much anymore, you’ll be amazed. Not in a good way.

It’s as if the owners are consumed with anxiety that their sport, at least in its unadorned state, is boring, so they have to extreme-tart it up. Fans can easily pay $800 for a pair of tickets, so we need to give them their money’s worth. Cue the spectacle.

There’s not a second of dead air. The moment Phil Kessel ices the puck, the ice girls come flouncing out, shovels at the ready. Meanwhile, some DJ is using an airgun to fire treats such as rolled up t-shirts into a rabid crowd screaming “Gimme Dat” so loud it drowns out Go Team Go. Over at the penalty box, the team mascot is mauling some delighted fan to Pitbull at 120 decibels, while the Jumbotron features the tonsil hockey tournament up in the nosebleeds.

         I’m amazed that nobody seems to mind paying $800 to be so infernally distracted. Not only do they not mind, fans and players are willing co-conspirators. Fans are strategically rude to the visiting team, and proud of it. In Seattle, the idea is to make so much noise that the other team can’t hear itself call the play, so the players end up violating the rules of procedure in various complicated ways. This boorish behaviour is called “The 12th Man” because NFL teams have 11 players, unlike CFL teams, which have 12 and have to resort to the 13th man.

Football players, all of whom make more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes, like to celebrate doing their jobs with all kinds of dances and pantomimes. It’s as if I just finished that last sentence and liked the phrase “dances and pantomimes” so much I did the bird dance around the desk while squawking “I am the greatest.”

Of course, every square inch of the arena or stadium not required for crowd control or used in the actual game is plastered with advertising. The innovation of electronic signage makes it possible to bombard the senses with hundreds of flashing images of sequential sponsors. You can run (to the concession stand, bwa-ha-ha!) but you can`t hide.

About the only throwback to the good old days is when a fight breaks out on the ice.

Say what you will about all these new-fangled innovations, but give me the spectacle of 19,000 people screaming as one for blood. Now that`s hockey.