“I’m coming for you. I’m gonna f---ing kill you.”

Yeah, I’m no lip-reader, but that’s what it appears Nic Dowd shouted at Logan Cooley while pointing at him and staring him down at the end of the Utah Mammoth’s Game 1 loss to the Vegas Golden Knights.

You kidding me?

“I’m gonna f---ing kill you.“ That’s really what one professional athlete said to another in the first game of a playoff series, a series that continues Tuesday night?

OK, so it’s a fact that some hardcore hockey folks not only celebrate this stuff, they love it and live for it. It’s a tough man’s game in a tough man’s league, not some namby-pamby lightweight contest in a namby-pamby lightweight league like, say, the regulated NBA, the NFL, or MLB. No, no, no. This is different. This is where machismo meets manhood on skates, once the puck is dropped. You put on the sweater and pick up a stick in the NHL, especially in the NHL playoffs, and, baby, as Ice Cube sang it way back in ‘92, it’s on like Donkey Kong.

That’s why when the gloves are shed in the middle of a game, much of the crowd stands and roars. Comic Rodney Dangerfield famously once said, “I went to a fight the other night and a hockey game broke out.”

What happened on Sunday night, though, wasn’t a fight. It was a death threat. OK, not an authentic, real-life death threat, just an I’m-gonna-kill-you kind of warning. In a series that was just beginning, the one player informed the other that he might not just get beat up in the games ahead, he would meet his Maker, or could, anyway. Something to think about.

I get it. Dowd didn’t mean it literally. At least one would presume he didn’t. He got fired up and barked like a dog in the night. But it was an ugly bark, even by hockey standards, one that showed some teeth.

Some of those aforementioned hardcore fans will laugh this off. They’ll say angry words hurled like that add incentive and interest and entertainment to playoff hockey. “I’m gonna kill you” simply adds competitive spice to the goings on. They’ll echo what I just said — that the fading 35-year-old Dowd, who has about a quarter of the talent that the rising 21-year-old Cooley has, didn’t mean what he said. He’s not aiming to actually murder the kid. He just might aim to maim him. You know, knock his teeth out or break a bone or some such. All in good hockey roughhousing fun.

The good fun that comes by way of a game played at high speed, on sharp blades, on hard, cold, fast surfaces, surrounded by wicked, punishing, unforgiving boards, by players wielding lumber or graphite or whatever legal combo-composite hockey sticks are made of these days. As the weapons they can become in the heat of battle, the maiming, indeed, can come easy.

It seems a frustrated Cooley shoved Dowd at center ice, popped him a bit, in the third period, and somehow Dowd ended up with a trickle of blood dripping down his face. It was the equivalent of a shooting star — Cooley — colliding with a dark, burned-out planet — Dowd — and the spent orb decided to try to intimidate the upcoming luminary.

Cooley was skating in his first NHL playoff game, and, as fate would have it, he scored the first goal for the Mammoth, his first-ever, the Utah team’s first-ever. Dowd scored later, too.

But Cooley, a few days earlier, talked about appearing in his initial playoff game, and he said he thought he knew what to expect — large doses of physicality, more than anything he’d seen in the regular season.

“It’s a lot faster, more physical,” Cooley predicted. And he was right. There was a whole lot of banging and bumping, jabbing and round-housing happening on Sunday night, also a high stick or two.

He also said he was all prepared, completely ready for that. And he had no intention, even as a young dude, of backing off or shrinking away from any grizzled veteran harboring bad intentions.

He did neither.

Cooley said nothing of receiving the threat, even a feigned one.

But that’s what he got in Game 1.

Not that he’s asking for help now from his bigger, typically more aggressive teammates, the Mammoth’s noted enforcers, but that’s what Cooley will get moving forward throughout this series, even without his requests. If Dowd, who’s always been known as a plucky, gritty center who also happens to have a slight edge over his new target in size, really does come after Cooley, there will be h-e-double-hockey-sticks for him to pay, compliments of Cooley’s protective boys, who now are on full alert.

Nobody’s gonna die here. Who knows, maybe even a few months from now Cooley and Dowd will share an adult beverage at the bar together and laugh the whole thing into memory. Maybe, maybe not.

Point is, in the meantime, on account of his big mouth, it’s as much Dowd as Cooley who will have to watch his blindside and his back, as all the angry Mammoth’s tusks have now been sharpened.