By Eric Huber Special to OnMilwaukee.com Published Mar 08, 2010 at 9:32 AM

With his pedal-to-the-floor style, boyish smile and captivating back flips in Victory Lane, Carl Edwards has spent the past few NASCAR seasons winning the hearts of every drag racer, Justin Bieber fan and somersaulting gymnast

Well, now you can add San Francisco Giants fanatics and Dale Earnhardt (Sr.) diehards to his expanding list of followers.

Brad Keselowski, on the other hand, might not join the fan club any time soon.

Edwards did the unthinkable.

"To come back and intentionally wreck someone, that's not cool," Keselowski said.

He did what for so long seemed to be the impossible.

"It looked like it could have been a payback from the No. 99 on the No. 12," vice president of competition Robin Pemberton said.

In one swift turn of the wheel, the taped-up No. 99 turned 99 percent of new-age NASCAR enthusiasts against him -- possibly for good -- with his wipeout move on, at the time, Keselowski's sixth-place No. 12 Dodge.

But let's get something straight, Edwards didn't just do it for his own ego. He did it for his fans and the sport itself, or so says the wishful thinking side of my brain. Quite frankly, upon thinking about the incident long and hard after my initial Edwards verbal beat-down, the only problem that I found wrong with the whole incident were Edwards' comments afterwards:

"I wish it wouldn't have gone like it did, but I'm glad he's OK and we'll just go on and race some more and maybe him and I won't get in any more incidents together. That would be the best thing."

No Carl, that would not be the best thing. See, not to sound insensitive, but this is exactly what NASCAR needed. Sure, the severity of the accident was a bit scary at first, but so were plenty of other crashes in the history of the sport. Sure, they didn't exactly feature a driver trying to purposely wipe out a fellow track mate who was 156 laps ahead, but you could argue that plenty of them were intentional.

Beside that, these are the types of moments that a lot of NASCAR followers go to the track for in the first place. I mean, do you honestly believe that most spend the big bucks in hopes of seeing commercially painted, tire squealing pieces of metal make 1,200-plus left turns?

So the question now is what kind of punishment should Edwards receive for his transgression?

If it were up to Keselowski, Edwards would receive a one-race suspension, but in reality the worst that should probably be cast upon the Aflac sponsored machine is a simple points loss; something around 100.

It'll be the perfect punishment. He'll ultimately feel like he let his team down, will have to push himself that much harder to get back in to the points race, and fans will still get to see No. 12 and No. 99 scrape paint in less than two weeks at Bristol; the perfect track for a classic bumper-banging car fight.

NASCAR seems to be on its way back, and although Atlanta Motor Speedway could've done without another bland Kurt Busch victory and backwards victory lap, it certainly wasn't lacking drama needed to captivate viewers and enthusiasts everywhere during the most important laps of the nap-time race.

What's next? Fisticuffs? A sucker punch? Some good old fashion helmet throwing?

Nah. Let's just save the temper tantrums for the track itself, and let's go racing boys!

Eric Huber Special to OnMilwaukee.com
Eric Huber is a staff writer for sportsbuff.com, profantasysports.com and rapiddraft.com.