The Lord of Loud has apologized and, in related news, hell has frozen over.

Yup, Donald S. Cherry stiffened himself in his Bully Pulpit, stared into the camera and said he was wrong. He said it once, he said it twice, he said for a third time that he was wrong to brand Chris Nilan, Stu Grimson and Jim Thomson "pukes, turncoats and hypocrites."

He also said he was "sorry." Twice.

And, as the words poured from his normally big, bad, bombastic mouth, I sat in stunned silence. I honestly couldn't believe what I was hearing. I mean, tell me Elvis is still alive and gigging at a biker bar in Armpit, Ala., and I might believe you. Tell me that Adam Sandler will actually make a good movie some day, and I might believe you.

But Donald S. Cherry apologize? Yeah, and there'll be no snow in Winnipeg this winter.

That, however, is exactly what he did during his Coachless Corner segment on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night. He offered a seemingly sincere mea culpa to retired enforcers Grimson, Nilan and Thomson for his astonishingly ill-mannered, ill-tempered, season-opening rant, when he claimed they wanted fighting banned from the National Hockey League because it led to depression and substance abuse.

"I was wrong," he said in a solemn, funereal-like tone. "I was wrong on a lot of things. I threw them under the bus and I'm sorry about it. I really am. I was wrong, 100 percent wrong. And when you're wrong, you have to admit it. I'm sorry I put them down."

His ever-loyal lap dog, Ron MacLean, sat ashen-faced and offered to share the blame for Cherry's verbal assault on Oct. 6.

"I was no help to you," he said.

I thought they were going to cry. Or kiss and hug.

My first thought? OK, who stole Don Cherry and what did you do with him?

Actually, I don't know what surprised me more, that Cherry was apologizing or that he was actually speaking a brand of English that I could actually understand. With the volume turned to low.

I'm reasonably certain that this trip down Mea Culpa Avenue was uncharted territory for Canada's most-recognized gasbag, because I can't recall him taking a step backward before. Not when he called former Winnipeg Jets assistant coach Alpo Suhonen "some kind of dog food." Not when he called Tomas Sandstrom "a backstabbing, cheap-shot, mask-wearing Swede." Not ever.

Yet, there he was in his pulpit, telling a nation of hockey watchers that he was "wrong" and "sorry."

Upon further review, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Cherry served up his first morsel of repentance to Grimson, Nilan and Thomson. They, after all, were his boys, the type of limited-talent thugs he's been glorifying ever since Hockey Night unleashed his mouth on an unsuspecting public three decades ago. Perhaps the genesis of this apology can be found in the knowledge that he had eaten his own, or maybe it was the threat of legal action.

Whatever the case, there's only one thing left to say: good on you, Grapes. It was the right thing to do.