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“Now it’s just a matter of getting the body to react the same way, doing the same things it used to. I still don’t think I skate as well as I used to. I don’t know if (the injury) has anything to do with it, or it’s just me changing my style . . . but I’m working on it, and I’m going to have to figure it out eventually.”

While Karlsson feels he’s “close” to being the player he was pre-injury, “I don’t think I’ve played up to those standards yet,” he says. “It’s something I’m dealing with and have to figure out. I want to get back there, be at my highest level. It’s getting better and better.”

Centre Kyle Turris remembers that night in Pittsburgh, the pain etched on Karlsson’s face as he hobbled to the bench from the corner where Cooke’s skate sliced into the leg. Every one of his teammates knew this was serious, long-term, if not career-threatening. Karlsson calmed their fears.

There he was in the dressing room, his leg already in a cast, wrapped, and he said to his teammates: “I’ll be fixed tomorrow and be back playing in the playoffs.”

“And he was,” Turris says. “Unbelievable.”

Karlsson’s ability to come back, at some measure of his former self, when others take eight to nine months to recover from an Achilles tear is just one of the reasons Turris calls him “a freak of nature.”

“He’s so gifted, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like him when it comes to athletic ability,” Turris says.

Head coach Dave Cameron feels Karlsson is “real close” to getting back to being the defenceman he was prior to the injury. Somewhat famously, Cameron said of Karlsson when he became head coach in mid-December, “I don’t want to cut his home runs down, I want to cut his strikeouts down.”