The blood of the most brutal feud in NHL history was on the hands of Claude Lemieux.

Until his final breath, the rugged player whom friends and Avalanche teammates fondly called Pepe could never wash away the stains on his heart.

“You know, it was hard for me to deal with that hit,” Lemieux confessed to me back in 2016. “It was one of those things you wish you could have taken back. I wish I just turned the other way. I wouldn’t have 15 or 20 years of dealing with it, of being asked about it.”

While wearing an Avalanche sweater during the 1996 playoff war with Detroit, Lemieux started a blood feud when he smashed the face of center Kris Draper to smithereens.

Three decades after a nasty hit that defined a rivalry, Lemieux carried scars of his own, until he could carry them no more.

“We all have our bruises,” Lemieux said in December, the last time we talked, during the 30-year celebration of a hockey championship all of Colorado cheered.

Then, in his next breath, this four-time Stanley Cup winner and impossibly handsome 60-year-old man told me the damage hockey did to him was masked by a healthy tan.

Those words haunt me now. How did we not see the pain?

Lemieux died Thursday. Alone. In a furniture warehouse near his Florida home. Cause of death: Suicide.

“I’m gutted. (Expletive) broken-hearted,” said Charlie Lyons, owner of the Avalanche team that hoisted the Cup in 1996. “Off the ice, he was an adorable human being. And as a hockey player? Insanely beautiful, that’s what Claude Lemieux was.”

In the history of hockey, if Lemieux wasn’t the greatest villain ever to lace up skates, he was certainly on the top 10 most-wanted list.

To put it mildly: Pepe was a little stinker on the ice. A power forward who was 215 pounds of trouble, Lemieux was equally adept at lighting the lamp or knocking your lights out.

“If you’re on the ice with Claude Lemieux and you turn your back, you are an idiot,” former Red Wings enforcer Darren McCarty often said.

But in a television interview with Woodward Sports Network after his bitter rival’s death, McCarty emphasized Lemieux “is the one person in life who has proved to me that the guy on the ice wasn’t the guy off the ice. He was loved very much.”

We turn our sports heroes into cartoon characters, filing them under good guys and bad dudes. Real life is more complicated. Lemieux was a living, breathing, human contradiction, as quick to hug as he ever was to cross-check. He was a shameless instigator and a tortured soul.

“I disliked a lot of guys. But hate is a big word,” Lemieux insisted, when I asked about his relationship with the Red Wings during the blood feud era. “Regardless of what happened on the ice, I never held grudges. But people tell me: ‘That’s easy for you to say, Claude. You were the one always causing the problem.'”

There was a twinkle in his eye when Pepe was contemplating hockey mischief. But after the massacre at Columbine High School left 13 dead in the spring of 1999, Lemieux did a small act of kindness, hiring a cleaning service to spiff up the home of a family with a hospitalized student.

Never hearing his name called by the Hall of Fame weighed heavily on Lemieux. An obsession with a sport he couldn’t quit until age 43, chasing his dreams from Canada to China, fractured relationships with his children, who weren’t on speaking terms with their famous father for years.

But I also knew him as a loving parent. While filing a column during that contentious series against Detroit in ’96, I noticed Lemieux carrying his infant son as he walked toward the parking lot of Big Mac.

Figuring the Wings bus might be idling on the far side of the arena doors, I followed to see what danger Pepe might find.

Sure enough, Detroit coach Scotty Bowman emerged from the dark to berate Lemieux for dirty play. Showing no fear, the Avs player climbed into the bus to insist Bowman show some class in the presence of his family.

The baby boy in Lemieux’s arms that night was Brendan. He grew up wanting nothing more than to do Dad proud, and ultimately scored 36 goals in a seven-year NHL career of his own.

It was also Brendan who discovered his father’s lifeless body.

“Brendan is completely destroyed,” Colombe Lacroix, widow of the architect who built the Avalanche into a league powerhouse, told the New York Post.  

Monday, before Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Final, Lemieux was honored by his original NHL team to carry a ceremonial torch into Montreal’s storied barn. He lifted the flame to the delight of 21,000 adoring Habs fans.

The video of a hockey hero’s last public appearance has been watched dozens of times by Lyons in the search for anything resembling a clue. While trying not to jump to conclusions, the smile of Lemieux looked out of character. “Sober and wistful,” Lyons said. “But I didn’t see peace … or joy.” 

In death, after a career of violent collisions, it is impossible not to wonder if the sport that gave Lemieux fame and fortune might have also done permanent damage to his brain. Would an autopsy in search of CTE bring a sense of closure, or only more agony?

On his flight to Denver for the championship reunion late last fall, Lemieux thought of deceased friends, including former Avs general manager Pierre Lacroix and teammate Chris Simon.

Lemieux looked at his cellphone on the plane. “Opened my contact list,” he said, “and began deleting names of guys who have passed. That’s the reality of life. It’s going to happen. We don’t know how many more years we have …”

A snapshot from the Avs championship reunion in December lingers in the mind of Lyons. There was Pepe, giving heartfelt hugs to the children of Simon, telling them what an honor it was to play alongside their father, the only man on that Avs team tougher than Lemieux.

Simon, his brain afflicted with the ravages of CTE, died by suicide in March 2024.

If heaven is a hockey rink, Lacroix now has Simon and Lemieux alongside him.

“We know one thing,” Lyons said. “Nobody’s going to mess with Pierre now.”