Last week, the father of a junior on a high school football team called the police to file assault charges, after a senior allegedly forced his son to partake in some kind of sick and twisted hazing ritual. The cops responded by looking at the evidence and dismissing it as nothing more than a bit of “locker room horseplay”. As you can imagine, there’s two versions to the story.

(We have no idea what’s going on here, but it has to be illegal in most states)

The police say that the senior - a student at Farmingdale High School in New York - smacked “the younger boy on the rear with the broomstick”, which would have only been some form of harassment, not assault, and that the senior’s one-week suspension from school was enough. The father, on the other hand, believed the senior tried to, well, force the broomstick into a very intimate area while his son was bent over. Oh, BroomstickGate, why do you have to be so complex?

The best part of the story might be this little passage, showing how the boy responded to the sanctity of his posterior being threatened. From NEWSDAY.COM:

Attorney Michael Rubin said the younger boy was bent over, changing after practice, when the older boy attempted to assault him with the broomstick. The younger boy grabbed the broom and snapped it in two, he said.

For someone to snap a broomstick in two means there must have been a decent amount of “fight or flight” responding going on, so let’s go ahead and assume the broomstick got pretty close to entering Liberace’s Palace of Pleasure. The biggest question we should all be asking ourselves is, where do all of these football players get their broomsticks?

First a high school team in New Mexico got caught using these witch-transports for nefarious purposes, and now this? Is there some kind of special on broomsticks at the football helmet store? And if not, is that just bad marketing?

So many unanswered questions. The important thing is that, hopefully, we’ve all learned something. What that is, who knows? Maybe the lesson is that, even in our darkest moments, when broomsticks are being forcibly shoved into our who-knows-what, it could always be worse: We could have crap on our heads.