Semyon Varlamov makes stunning return to Islanders after 676-day wait: Nothing holds me back
Six hundred and seventy-six days ago Tuesday, Semyon Varlamov was in net for a mostly forgettable overtime loss in Washington.One of the many great mysteries of everything that’s happened since that afternoon is that Varlamov was not declared injured until two games later.He backed up Ilya Sorokin the next day against Buffalo and sat on the bench in Montreal for another overtime loss three days later.
Only then did the Islanders begin to hold him out with what was initially called a lower-body injury.It is almost miraculous that those days did not mark the end of Varlamov’s NHL career.Nearly two years and two partial knee replacements later, the now-38-year-old Varlamov led the Islanders onto the Madison Square Garden ice Tuesday night, his first time starting a regular-season game since an injury that seemed almost certain to keep him from doing exactly that ever again.“Everything feels great.
Everything feels 100 percent,” Varlamov, two bulky knee pads in tow, said after an eventual 5-2 loss to the Rangers.“Nothing holds me back, which is great news.”While Varlamov will want more performance-wise — he gave up three goals on 22 shots before the Rangers scored twice into an empty net — if there was ever a night in which a player was above criticism, this was it.It likely didn’t help either that the Rangers took until 6:40 into the game to take their first shot — an Oliver Bjorkstrand slapper that Varlamov admitted surprised him, and which went in — or that it took until 12:12 for another shot, which Varlamov saved from Mika Zibanejad.“When you haven’t played a game for a while, of course, so many thoughts going through your head,” Varlamov said.
“How are you gonna perform tonight, what’s gonna happen and just a thousand thousand thoughts going through your head during the day and before the game.”That piece of the equation, presumably, will fade as the novelty of Varlamov playing fades into the rhythms of a season.It is, though,...