With Derek Dorsett back, the hockey forecast was for stormy conditions with a 50 percent chance of a hurricane. It just so happens that the Blue Jackets were in need of a hurricane, and if not a hurricane, then, well, something.

That "something" is what Dorsett does. It's why that 1-5-3 record the Jackets compiled while Dorsett was nursing a concussion was understandable, even if it was somewhat surprising.

Dorsett is a shift-disturber, as Blue Jackets broadcaster George Matthews calls it when he's not on the air, because on the air it sounds too much like an off-color phrase that describes what Dorsett does even better. When Dorsett is skating around the ice hitting everything that moves, and some things that don't, he raises the team's energy level because, as coach Ken Hitchcock says, it makes all of his teammates accountable.

How can anyone skate through the motions when one of his teammates is out there trying to start World War III?

"I wish I was in the old era, you know?" Dorsett said yesterday morning. His eyes brightened at the question. He was wearing a crooked smile. "I played junior A and I think I played 20 games and had 180 penalty minutes 25 fights."

Old-time hockey fits Dorsett's style, which isn't to say that an NHL team can't use a player like him now. It would be difficult to attribute the Blue Jackets' 3-0 win last night over the Florida Panthers to the fourth-line dynamo, but who really knows what difference a guy makes when he is revving his engine that hard?

At one point in the first period, he took a hard go at Panthers defenseman Dmitry Kulikov, and when Kulikov ducked, Dorsett flew over the top of him like a heat-seeking missile.

"If he played in the old days and we had the new rules, I'd be broke," Hitchcock said. "I would be absolutely broke. I'd be walking the streets. Both of us would be in a lot of trouble. I coached in the old days and I would be getting a lot of phone calls.

"He's a throwback. But those guys, that's a dying breed. That's a real dying breed. Teams are crying for those types of players."

Hitchcock ticked off the names of some other throwbacks -- Darcy Tucker (whom Dorsett idolized while growing up), Mike Keane, Brian Skrudland, Kirk Muller, Guy Carbonneau, Mark Recchi -- and then said wistfully, "Those guys are hard to find."

Unless, that is, you're in the Blue Jackets' dressing room. Then all it takes is the time to turn around.

Dorsett knows that he can bring the team's energy level up, but he seems almost reluctant to admit it. His modesty seems funny because his on-ice persona is so aggressive. In that way, Dorsett is a little like Jody Shelley, the Jackets' longtime enforcer, who was as nice a guy as you'd ever want to meet -- off the ice.

"Any time you see a guy playing hard and finishing their checks and being the first one in on the forecheck and working hard, well, when I see other guys doing it, it drags me into the fight if I'm not," Dorsett said. "You're not going to feel 100 percent every night of an 82-game schedule, so when you see other guys working hard, you kind of follow them. So if I can help out that way, it will be great. But it's going to be a group thing that is going to turn this thing around."

The group did it last night. Steve Mason got his first shutout of the season, and Jason Chimera, Derek Brassard and Samuel Pahlsson scored the goals. But having Dorsett out there, playing like that concussion never happened, has to help. It didn't seem to affect him at all.

"No," he said. "Some people are different. For me, it doesn't bother me. I don't even think about (injuries) when I come back."

Uh, that's not totally true.

"Well, I did think about it when I had a broken hand and had surgery, came back and three weeks later and it still (wasn't) healed," he said. "I thought maybe I shouldn't drop the gloves and fight."

He grinned.

"But I still did it."

Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for  The Dispatch.

bhunter@dispatch.com