Many thought that the Max Pacioretty/Zdeno Chara/Sgt. Ian Lafreniere circus was a thing of the past, but it once again reared its ridiculous head this week when the Montreal Police Department revealed that it still intended to speak to the Bruins' captain about the whatever-you-want-to-call-it that happened back on March 8. That means more rehashing of the whole ordeal, more reminders and more opinions. 

You can decide which people in this whole fiasco are the craziest, but if one thing has been made clear the last few months, it’s that Pacioretty isn’t close to being a candidate. The only thing he’s been guilty of is seemingly forgetting that trash talk should be saved for the ice, and not put on Twitter for all to see. 

Bruins fans aren’t supposed to like Pacioretty. As has been made glaringly clear, they don’t.

In fact, nobody outside the Bell Centre needs to like the Connecticut native who celebrated a goal by shoving the biggest man in hockey and later caught an unsuspecting B’s blueliner off guard in the Feb. 9 penalty-minute bonanza between the Bruins and the Habs. 

Yet the one thing anyone with an ounce of logic and/or decency should be able to do is feel for him, as much as they might despise him in uniform. They should also realize that, all things considered, he has not been in the wrong since his season was cut short by a scary hockey play that left him concussed and with a neck injury.

He wanted Chara suspended. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, and given the history between he and Chara (the aforementioned shove, Chara racing to the aid of Steven Kampfer on Feb. 9) he could be biased. 

But that was it. When Pacioretty said last week that he couldn’t watch Chara lift the Cup, he didn’t say it was because the mean old 6-foot-9 man didn’t deserve it. He said it was because the Canadiens came so close to eliminating the Bruins in the first round that watching the rivals win it all was too much to take. He said maybe the Habs would have won if they had everyone healthy. Reading between the lines, he was suggesting that if the play never happened, maybe he’d be on the ice in that first round and maybe the Bruins would have lost. Who knows? Maybe they would have. 

But throughout the lunacy that has been the Montreal police having to question Chara as part of a criminal investigation, Pacioretty has been amongst the voices of reason, stating multiple times Chara should not be prosecuted. But every time there’s a peep from Pacioretty, there’s an infuriated reaction from at least someone, and it makes as much sense as the investigation itself.

"Last comment on this: I hope Chara is NOT prosecuted,” Pacioretty tweeted on Tuesday. “I have moved on from my incident and I hope everyone else can do the same."

One response he got from a Bruins fan after tweeting that? 

“Does this mean the Bruins can have a max Pacioretty bobble head neck brace night when u r in town? Lmao [sic].”

LMAO, of course, stands for “laughing my [rear end] off.” Without revealing the user’s name, and in the interest of keeping things clean, tweeting something like that is a textbook [rear end]-clown thing to do -- especially with such difficulty in the field of capitalization. Yet that’s the type of stuff Pacioretty has seen since the play that ended his season. Somehow everything’s been his fault. 

Maybe he can handle the tweets about his injuries, or the ones suggesting he’s a faker or even the ones about Game 5 of the quarterfinals being longer than his time in the hospital. Professional athletes are supposed to tolerate whatever garbage is thrown their way, but given how easy it is for Bruins fans to look like the sane ones compared to Habs fans (did you hear people in Montreal called the cops?), some have simply chosen against it. 

People can believe that the Habs exaggerated his concussion, which Mark Recchi infamously stated to create a media diversion (he later spoke glowingly of the Montreal medical staff, genuinely appearing to have created controversy to protect Chara). They can believe that it wasn’t as bad as the Canadiens said it was. But if one is to do that and treat an assumption in such an unknown area as fact, they'll be lumped in with those who were insensitive enough to question why Nathan Horton was on the ice after Game 7 of the Cup finals (in the case of the latter, people north of the border actually did that, if you can stomach the thought). To question either is idiotic, but that’s what people do these days. Frankly, the fact that we’re in an age where everyone with a keyboard considers themselves a concussion specialist doesn’t bode well anyway. 

And if you believe the Habs' organization lied or embellished, why take it out on Pacioretty? When he realized he could go to the movies, should he have tweeted that the Canadiens needed a new medical staff? 

Pacioretty has an easy enough time getting people on the ice to not like him, but to throw him in with the crazies who called the cops and wanted Chara arrested would be dead wrong. To call him a faker is plain foolish, as he would have played if he were able to. He says he wants to put all this behind him, and while it may never go away, keeping it in the past would be the best thing for him. There are plenty of reasons for B’s fans to hate Pacioretty, but the way he’s handled himself in the midst of all the lunacy can’t be one of them.