My Darling B and I finally went to the roller derby on Sunday, because nothing is more romantic than watching women on roller skates beating the crap out of each other.

It was the Mad Rollin’ Dolls’ “Love Hurts” match-up, with the Unholy Rollers facing off against the Reservoir Dolls in the first half, and Madison’s own Quad Squad versus Appleton’s Paper Valley Roller Girls in the second half.

I have to say, this was a whole lot of fun. More fun, truth be told, than the Badger hockey game. We had a really good time there, too, but the crowd was a lot more entertaining there than the game was. At the derby, there was no question that the Mad Rollin’ Dolls were more fun to watch.

And the game rules are a lot easier to understand. All I know about hockey is, the puck goes in the net. I don’t know or understand any of the subtleties about how it gets there because the action’s a little too fast for me and it’s pretty hard to see that tiny little puck most of the time.

I don’t know much more about roller derby, either, but there’s not a lot to know. There’s five or six girls from each team on the track. One of them, usually the fastest, slipperiest one of the bunch, is called a “jammer.” And the object of the game is for the jammer to lap the opposing team as many times in two minutes as she can. The opposing team, naturally, tries to stop her.

That’s it. Anybody can follow it. And it’s surprisingly easy to appreciate the strategies the women use to play for points. When only one of the jammers is on the track, for instance, her team mates will slow down to a crawl, forcing the other team to slow down, too, because they can’t block the jammer when she’s not in the pack. That lets the really fast jammers build up speed to do their slippery eel thing and score a lot of points.

And unlike the roller derby you might have run across on late-night television, the play doesn’t break down into a girl fight every five minutes, at least not in this league. The Mad Rollin’ Dolls were there to have fun. Not that they weren’t competitive as hell, but they very obviously didn’t take themselves too seriously. The costumes are a dead giveaway, it seems to me. You can’t be too all ate up about the sport when you call yourself Ally Gator and sew a tail and horny spikes down the back of your green satin skating dress.