That's a very good question. The answer starts with the last of what you said. Players are players and they get absorbed in what they're doing. They react intensely to what is going on, and they're not very likely to stop being that way when they play.
Players will play injured. They love to play injured. That's part of the challenge of playing. It's like another opponent, and you're trying to defeat that opponent as well. You can deliver some of these messages, but you have that as a problem.
You also have as a problem the fact that a lot of the players are between the ages of, say, 13 and 30 or 35, and when you're between 13 and 35, there are no consequences. You think that whatever injury you have is nothing and you won't feel it when you're 40 or 50, or afterwards, so it's hard to get that message across.
That's why it's always critical for another set of eyes to exist, for a coach's eyes to be there, a trainer's eyes, a doctor's eyes, a parent's eyes, to be able to watch that and say, “This doesn't look right”; to say that when that player comes off the ice, they don't look right; to say, “I've seen them when they look right, and I look at their face now and they don't look right”; and to have the confidence to say, “Joey—or Janey—tonight your night is done; you did great out there, but tonight the game is over for you, and let's see what the next couple of days are like.”
To a huge extent, it's the non-players in those roles or in the administrative roles. Again, the sports administrators are there and they're the ones who set the rules; they're the ones who set the regulations.
It's easy to say, at every age, “Well, this is a player and they want to play,” and let them have that free choice to play and all the rest of it. That's terrific, up to a certain point at which there might well be a problem; there might well be health consequences in it.
That's why it's so important that those sports decision-makers apply the right grid, because there are never going to be doctors around at every game and not everybody is going to be taking a course, and not every player is going to have the courage to say, “No, I don't think I should continue to play.”