picked up by an Air Force plane and taken to Maryland<\/a>, whence they traveled to Washington and the White House to meet President Donald Trump. Later, they attended Tuesday night\u2019s State of the Union address at the Capitol.<\/p>\n\u201cIt was crazy, man, honestly,\u201d Hughes said.<\/p>\n
All three were back in Minnesota in time to fly with the team to Denver for their first game NHL game since early February.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were flying everywhere,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want it to end. We didn\u2019t want to leave the guys. It was funny, before the last day we were all saying how depressed we were because it was already over, pretty much.\u201d<\/p>\n
The American women\u2019s and men\u2019s Olympic gold medals touched off a national celebration, but controversy quickly followed. In a call to the men\u2019s team\u2019s jubilant locker room, the president invited the team to attend the State of the Union address, then joked that he also had to invite the women or he would likely be impeached.<\/p>\n
In videos of the call, players can be seen laughing at what has widely been perceived as a misogynistic attempt at humor by the president. Faber, while noting how unequivocally supportive the U.S. men\u2019s and women\u2019s teams have been to one another, said he regrets how those postgame moments unfolded.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s things that obviously were, um, were bad,\u201d he said Thursday. \u201cUnfortunate. Things that you want back. Things in the moment. But at the end of the day, I just wish people could really understand, like, the real love and support we do have for each other and how special it is for both sides.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hughes, whose mother Ellen was on staff with the U.S. women\u2019s team, said the perception that the men were anything but supportive of their American counterparts is off-base.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they know that they had our support,\u201d he said, noting that he watched the women\u2019s gold medal game with his brother Jack and former NFL star Tom Brady. \u201cWe spent a ton of time with them, honestly. We celebrated with them after we won. So, yeah, I mean, I know they were extremely happy for us when we won, and we were really happy for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
After all of that, the Wild\u2019s Olympians had to quickly switch their focus to a pair of road games at Colorado and Utah as the Wild looked to pick up where they left off. The Wild had an 8-1-1 streak going before the three-week break.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing able to get here last night with the guys and fly over with them on the plane and everything like that, just to finally have a little bit of time to decompress and hang out with those guys that we haven\u2019t seen in a while was really nice,\u201d Boldy said. \u201cMentally, and obviously you take care of yourself physically to be able to go tonight. But it\u2019s been pretty special.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boldy scored a first-period goal for Team USA in the victory over Canada that gave the American men their first gold medal since the 1980 Miracle On Ice team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DENVER \u2014 From the moment Jack Hughes scored in overtime to beat Canada on Sunday morning, things got…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5118],"tags":[5,161,38,5280,4,1496,43,162],"class_list":{"0":"post-473885","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-minnesota-wild","8":"tag-hockey","9":"tag-minnesota","10":"tag-minnesota-wild","11":"tag-minnesotawild","12":"tag-nhl","13":"tag-quinn-hughes","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-wild"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116139445199576339","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"MILAN,](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/STP-Z-GOLD-0223-02.jpg\")
MILAN, ITALY – FEBRUARY 22: Jack Hughes #86 and Quinn Hughes #43 of Team United States celebrates following the Men’s Gold Medal match between Canada and the United States on day 16 of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic games at Milano Santagiulia Ice Hockey Arena on February 22, 2026 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Elsa\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n