The Rangers’ gold medal-winning contingent returned to their training facility Wednesday, rejoining the last-place team after experiencing the complete opposite during the championship run in Milan.
Admittedly exhausted forwards Vincent Trocheck and J.T. Miller — as well as head coach Mike Sullivan, who helmed Team USA — were back on the ice as the Rangers prepared to resume their regular-season schedule with the first of their final 25 games Thursday night against the Flyers at the Garden.
“I think everyone understood the magnitude of it prior to the tournament and what it would mean to win, and then everything coming true, it’s like a dream come true,” Miller said after practice in Tarrytown. “We haven’t had any time to take anything in, we were just kind of living in the moment the last three, four days. I’m gonna enjoy going to sit on the couch with my family and talk about it all.”
The Rangers captain said he and Trocheck arrived back in New York around 2 a.m. after attending President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night at the U.S. Capitol with many of the other American players.
The team also had partied together the previous days in Miami, with the 32-year-old Miller even going viral for crowd surfing and singing during one of the nightclub celebrations there.
“No, certainly not,” Miller replied when asked if he’d ever done that before. “I’ve done karaoke a time or two, but definitely haven’t crowd surfed. I thought if there’s ever a time and place, why not?”
Sullivan said he arrived home Wednesday afternoon, proud of what the U.S. group accomplished in becoming the first since the 1980 Miracle on Ice team to capture Olympic gold.
“Obviously it was an incredible run. It was a whole lot of fun, from our standpoint, to work with just a terrific group of players. It was the honor of a lifetime,” Sullivan said. “As I said to you guys before I went over there, it’s everything I anticipated it to be, and then some and obviously to come back with a gold medal was an incredible thrill. I couldn’t be more proud of the players.
“I believed we were [going to win], because I believed we had a really good team and the way that group came together, we were proud of them.”
Sullivan also beamed over his two top six forwards, Miller and Trocheck, who accepted and excelled within fourth-line and penalty-killing roles in Milan.
“J.T. and Troch, we felt would play a big part in helping our team become a team in the true sense of the word,” Sullivan said. “I couldn’t be more proud of those two guys.
the team’s gold-medal victory over Canada. Getty Images
“No. 1, they’re Rangers, but they’re also great people, and they’re proud Americans, and the way they played over there speaks for itself. They were just terrific in the roles that we cast them in.”
Trocheck used the word “validation” after some questioned his inclusion on the roster.
“I mean, we won a gold medal, right? It’s validation,” he said. “I think for me personally, just knowing all the noise that was out there, and knowing what my role was going to be over there, and being able to do it as well as we did, me and J.T. being 100 percent on the penalty kill, and talking a lot of D-zone faceoffs, doing all that stuff, there’s definitely a lot of validation. To be able to come back with the gold is something that will stick with me forever.”
The experience must lessen the sting of such a disappointing season for the Rangers, who won only three of their final 18 games before the break to fall to the bottom of the Eastern Conference at 22-29-6 overall with the March 6 trade deadline looming.
“Not much sleep coming here today, but we know we need to get on the ice and be back with the team,” Miller said. “We’ve got a game [Thursday], so I wanted to make sure we’re getting back with the guys and get in the flow of things. So it’s great to see everybody.
“This is the part where we’re professionals and have a job to do, and we have to obviously change the narrative over the last six weeks of the season.”