Jarring transition awaits Blackhawks’ Teuvo Teravainen after bronze medal with Finland

Blackhawks forward Teuvo Teravainen excels at knocking pucks out of midair with his stick. Even compared to other NHL players, he’s exceptionally good at it.

So it will probably linger in Teravainen’s brain for a while that he just barely missed swatting Connor McDavid’s cross-ice saucer pass to Nathan MacKinnon in the Olympic semifinal.

MacKinnon buried his ensuing shot with 35 seconds left, sending Canada to the gold-medal game and sending Finland to an eventual bronze-medal victory over Slovakia. Nevertheless, Teravainen enjoyed his unique Olympic journey.

“It’s such an awesome experience, just to hang out with all the Finns and play for your country,” Teravainen said Wednesday. “Every time you step on the ice, you put everything out there. This time, we got at least something back home. Bronze is still pretty cool. Either way, it was so close to beating Canada, but just didn’t go our way at the end.”

His transition back to the Hawks could be jarring in numerous ways, most notably because there’s an enormous dropoff in intensity and stakes during the NHL regular-season grind compared to the Olympics.

The Hawks have 25 games left, starting Thursday against the Predators — the beginning of a four-game road trip (Predators, Avalanche, Mammoth, Jets) leading up to the March 6 trade deadline. Teravainen is very unlikely to be dealt with another year left on his contract, but the same can’t be said for several teammates.

At least he will get to enjoy the comforts of five-star hotels and NHL-caliber arenas again on this trip. In Milan, he was squashed in a small room in the Olympic Village with a roommate — Stars defenseman Esa Lindell — and then shuffling back and forth from an incomplete arena with warm temperatures and soft ice.

“But it was cool, kind of like a junior camp,” Teravainen added.

He hoped to get back to Chicago quickly enough to have a few days to rest, readjust his sleep schedule and prepare mentally for the jarring transition, but winter weather thwarted that plan.

Team USA and Team Canada re-routed their flight paths from New York to Miami, but Team Finland did not, leaving all of the Finnish players — including Teravainen — stuck in the blizzard.

He had “zero fun” in New York, and he didn’t get back to Chicago until Tuesday night, less than 24 hours before the Hawks’ flight to Nashville.

His return leaves the Hawks with a logjam of forwards. He slotted onto Nick Foligno’s fourth line in practice Wednesday, which pushed Colton Dach down into healthy-scratch territory.

That’s part of why the Hawks are likely to trade a few veterans (Connor Murphy, Jason Dickinson, potentially Ilya Mikheyev) before the deadline: they need to open up more spots for young players.

But that hasn’t happened yet, and coach Jeff Blashill said he’s not worried about asset management. For now, he will “play the guys we feel give us the best chance to win.”

Inside the locker room, the Hawks haven’t given up yet on a playoff push, even though forecasting models put their odds below 1%. The idea of bursting out of the break hot, narrowing the 10-point gap currently separating them from a wild-card spot, has been mentioned frequently during the past week of practices.

“We’ve maybe not been as good the last 25 games as we would’ve liked to be, but we’re still in a position where, if we put a good win streak in a row here, we’re able to give ourselves a fighting chance,” defenseman Alex Vlasic said. “It’s fun for us to have that in our heads going through these last 25 games. The last few years we haven’t had that; we’ve kind of been eliminated by now.

“We can really make a statement as a team, with the youth that we have, that we’re really serious in this locker room.”