W5500 LAN Survives Soft Reset

[thestumbler]

Setup is Pyboard v1.1 with Adafruit Ethernet Feather W5500 module connected. My problem is that the network object (I'll call it the NIC) doesn't reset on power up, nor can I re-instantiate it. There doesn't appear to be any function to re-initialize, de-initialize, or query the NIC once the board has done a soft reset. However, the NIC still works, and I can open sockets for TCP and UDP communications.

My temporary workaround is to check the reset reason at boot time, and create the NIC object only if it was a hard reset. However, this means I have no visibility to whether an ethernet cable is connected or not. I posted about this on the Micropython forums, but got no reply https://forum.micropython.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=11576

Is this the intended operation of the W5500 module? Or am I doing something boneheaded?