Sara Smith has certainly watched her share of hockey games. But she was downright baffled by what she saw last Friday.

All night, Sara witnessed her brother, Harvard captain Kenny Smith, trade body checks with one of his closest friends, Vermont forward Art Femenella.

Smith is 6’2, 215 pounds. Femenella (6’7, 248) is college hockey’s Gheorghe Muresan. These were not love taps.

But there the towering men stood after the 6-4 UVM victory, helmets off, smiling, with arms around each other as Smith’s mother snapped photographs.

Minutes later, more players who had hacked and whacked at each other all night talked near the exit doors of Bright Hockey Center.

“How can you do that?” Sara asked Kenny. “How can you guys run into each other all over the ice, talk trash, then be best friends afterward?”

The captain shrugged. “That’s hockey,” he replied.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can’t get enough of it. As a result of its popular-but-not-that-popular nature, college hockey inspires a blissful cult following. And the players—many of whom left Mom and Dad for a year or more during high school to chase their dreams—are part of the sport’s charm.

Smith and Femenella, for example, are from different states but have known each other since 1998, when they were 17 and playing in the U.S. National Team Developmental Program in Ann Arbor, Mich.

They were fast friends and still are today. Femenella has visited the Smith cabin in Groton, Vt., about eight times. And last summer, Smith went to New Jersey for the wedding of Femenella’s sister. “That,” Smith said, “was a blast.”

Smith also hosted what you might call the Stanley Cup of gatherings at his cabin last summer: the entire Harvard men’s team, Femenella and his boys from Jersey, Smith’s buddies from his hometown of Stoneham, and Vermont forward Brady Leisenring, another of Smith’s good friends from his days in Ann Arbor.

“Hockey’s a small world,” Leisenring said.

Everybody really does know everybody—and everybody knows there’s nothing better than flipping your buddy over the boards. Or, better yet, giving him a couple haymakers for the ride home.

“If there was fighting in college hockey,” Smith said, he and Femenella “would’ve squared off right at center ice. Then we’d sit around the campfire and talk about it all summer.”

(Insert a Tim Allen-inspired grunt here.)