The Vancouver Canucks had their Vezina runner-up goaltender Thatcher Demko back in the starters crease on Tuesday night against the St. Louis Blues.

While it was a losing effort, it looked like the Demko Canucks fans are used to seeing. The San Diego, California native had a solid return, stopping 21 of 25 shots. However, there were a few defensive lapses leading to breakaways and odd-man rushes that the netminder stood in front of to keep his team in the game.

Canucks Head Coach Rick Tocchet had this to say on how Demko looked in his return to the lineup:

“I thought he was good tonight. It was good to see him back. He looks big. I love seeing him back in. He’s worked really hard. I thought he did a great job for us tonight.”

After the game, Demko met with the media to discuss how he felt after his first start of the season:

“I felt rusty for sure,” Demko said. “Obviously it’s frustrating losing. I thought I could have played a couple [of] goals differently. I’m sure that there’s stuff that I can pull to keep building but obviously it’s frustrating right now.”

Demko hasn’t played since Game 1 of the Canucks’ opening-round series against the Nashville Predators on April 21st. Which, looking at the calendar, is 234 days without going through a normal routine for NHL action. Demko touched on how his day went before making that first start:

“It kind of felt like a whirlwind of a day. I think a part of it is trying to remember your routines. I’ve talked about managing expectations and not putting too much weight on that first game back, but obviously, as the moment builds, you’re excited to play and you want to perform. So, yeah, definitely a little bit of a weird day. Just getting back into the grove of things [but] we have a couple more games to build that up.”

Having gone through an injury and so many days off, it’s not only a battle for the player to return back to physical form, but it’s also a struggle mentally to feel confident to return to game action. Here’s Demko on juggling the mindset of returning both physically and mentally to NHL action and how fast the different speed is compared to practice:

“It’s all of it. There’s only so much you can do physically. I feel like I’ve done all that stuff. I mean, a part of getting back into it is just warming up the mentals again and going through the mindset of a game day and getting ready to play.

“Ha-ha, fast,” Demko said. “I thought I felt better as the game went along. But yeah, it’s just the speed of things; the traffic in front of you is tough. Those are all just in-game reads that I think will get sharper over time.”

There was belief Demko would be able to return to the Canucsk lineup had they made it to the third round in the Western Conference Finals against the Dallas Stars. However, his popliteus injury held him out for 38 consecutive Canucks games. Throughout the process, Demko described that he put his knee “through hell.” So, to finally be able to return to game action in the same year is something that didn’t hold light on Demko:

“Yeah, I mean, obviously. I was out for a long time. You have anxiety about things like that. Mentally there’s a couple [of] times during the game where I’m thinking about it a little bit just to kind of work through those things. That’s just part of the mentality of a game day and just building that confidence back up.”

While it was such a long healing process for the Canucks netminder, he’s encouraged with this progress and is optimistic that his next few starts will help him return to form:

“I can’t speak to what these games upcoming will look like. But as far as my reads and stuff goes, I’d like to think so. There’s a [of] couple things I thought I can clean up that shouldn’t take too much time. You know, just different reads and different ideas positionally, things like that. Like I said, I’m frustrated losing the game. I thought I want to make a couple of those saves. There’s things I can build off of.”

It was a valiant effort for the long-awaited season debut of Thatcher Demko. The Canucks have three more games on their current home stand for Demko to nab his first win of the season.