Elements from all of the above came together in 1994, when 13 members of the Tilbury Hawks, a junior C team in the Ontario Hockey Association, were charged with 135 criminal violations, including multiple counts of sexual assault and sexual exploitation. They were cited for their involvement in an initiation party that included group masturbation, the shaving of pubic hair, and forced drinking.

The Tilbury players were told to do pushups and positioned on the floor so that their genitals would dip into cups of beer; whoever did the fewest pushups had to drink both beers. In another contest, the team captain placed marshmallows into the rectum of two rookies, with the last one able to push it back out being forced to eat both. Players also were blindfolded and told to lie face-up on the floor with their tongues out, as another person sat on their faces.

All of these alleged acts happened at the home of Dennis Lebert, one of the team's owners and a respected ear doctor in Chatham. In the end, team trainer Paul Everaert, 46, and team captain Ed Fiala, 25, pleaded guilty to committing indecent sexual acts. Their punishment: a total of $6,000 in fines.

"The (hazing) you see in hockey is highly sexual," said Laura Robinson, author of Crossing the Line, a groundbreaking 1998 book on violence and sexual assault in Canada's national sport.

Robinson, noting that many young players are new to sexual experiences, argues that some of the initiation acts serve as a hidden way for players to explore homosexual urges. "I think the boys are curious about bodies, but because of their homophobia they had to turn it into something else" -- sexual forms of hazing, she said.

"I've seen kids quit because they were so scared of that happening," said one college hockey player in North Dakota who spoke to ESPN.com on the condition he not be identified. While playing junior hockey in Montana, British Columbia and Saskatchewan, he said he saw rookies stuffed naked into the bathroom at the back of team buses, and games of tug of war in which skate laces were tied around rookies' penises. He said he also players who had strings tied around their penises, which were then connected to a hanging bucket that other players threw pucks into.

"They think it's good for team-building, but there are other ways to do that," he said.

Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goaltender and current president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, said the only hazing he endured during his playing years was getting his head shaved at Cornell University, in 1966. But he knows that hazing can turn abusive in hockey, even when rookies seem to have given their consent.

"The question is how it's felt, not how it's delivered," Dryden said. "You guys (who haze) may do it with a smile on your face and a laugh in your heart, but do not assume that the other guy is feeling the same way."

Maturity can help negotiate those scenarios. By the time Johnston turned professional in 1996, with the Huntington Blizzard, an affiliate of the Bruins in the East Coast Hockey League, the only hazing that remained was being required to buy dinner for the veterans, he said. Even at Ohio University, he considered the hazing activities to be acceptable, mostly consisting of one big night of drinking.

For Johnston, now an executive with a technology finance company, the worst of it was left in youth hockey.

"Hazing is like fighting -- part of the game," he said. "Part of the game that people who haven't played it just wouldn't understand."

Tom Farrey is a senior writer with ESPN.com and can be reached at tom.farrey@espn.com.