The Sabres, minus their two Olympians in Tage Thompson and Rasmus Dahlin, returned to practice Wednesday ahead of their remaining 25-game push to make the playoffs.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — With Tage Thompson and Rasmus Dahlin at the Olympics in Italy, the rest of their Sabres teammates, returned to the ice back here in Buffalo on Wednesday.

This practice at Harborcenter marked the first one for the Sabres since the start of the Olympic break, with 13 days passing since the last time we saw the team in action on Feb. 5.

“Good to get back and get going,” Sabres coach Lindy Ruff said. “We met here yesterday for a while and got to skate. We’ll get a couple of days of skating and get ready to roll.”

Ruff says he’s been to able to catch “quite a bit” of the Olympic action involving both Dahlin and Thompson, saying he thought “they both represented our team great.”

Wednesday, though, the attention was on the rest of the team that was on the ice and getting them back to game speed.

“Today was more about conditioning and compete and we probably went over, not probably, we went over where we had kind of mapped out,” Ruff said.

The Sabres entered the break holding on to the top wild card spot in the Eastern Conference, putting the team possibly in position to break its record long 14 year playoff drought.

However, 25 games remain coming out of the break to make that dream a reality. Knowing what’s on the line is adding even more hunger as the Sabres return to action.

“Kind of realized that there’s only 25 games left and really just put all your eggs in one basket and go out on a high note and just control all the things that we can and we’ll see what happens,” forward Josh Norris said.

Defenseman Mattias Samuelsson added: “I think the break is obviously nice for everybody. Just give the bodies and minds a rest, but obviously it was a longer break than usual, so I think definitely towards the end, everyone was pretty eager and excited to get back.

He added: “Especially (with) how our season’s been going and where we are in the standings, everyone’s excited to keep playing finish the push.”