“The point of the poke, the punch and the enemy meal is to whip up a feeling that Vince Lombardi called “synthetic hatred,” said Ken Pendleton, a practitioner and researcher at the Sports Conflict Institute based in Eugene.

“You don’t hate the person before the game,” Pendleton said. “You would never break the rules to win. You would never want to see somebody get hurt, and when the game is done, you shake hands. There’s something fun and even valuable about the idea of that synthetic hatred, but it has to be kept within those bounds.””

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