Rules that dare not speak their name

MUCH of this last week has been spent pondering a new book on sale in the US called The Code, written by Ross Bernstein.

It’s subtitled The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL, just in case you thought it was a delicate tale of forbidden love between butterfly hunters that reaches across three generations.

We’ll return to this book another time, but it set us to thinking: forget about those pesky participants and their nitpicking conventions. What are the unwritten rules for sports fans? No — the unwritten rules for sports nuts?