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TSN Toronto Maple Leafs Reporter

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TORONTO — Zach Hyman only missed two days of Maple Leafs’ training camp after taking a shot off the leg in Friday’s practice, but in a two-week long camp, even that short absence can feel eternal.

“It felt like it was longer than a couple days mentally, just because it's [so] condensed,” Hyman said on a Zoom call with reporters from Ford Performance Centre on Tuesday. “But it was great to be out there again. I obviously took a shot there and it was just precautionary [to be held out] and I'm feeling good.”

Hyman was battling in front of the net during Friday’s special teams drills when a wayward puck caught him hard in the leg, sending him crumbling to the ice. After several minutes on the bench, Hyman resumed skating with his group, but then was deemed “unfit to play” in two weekend scrimmages.

The 28-year-old entered Leafs camp finally feeling fully recovered from a torn ACL suffered last April that cost him the first 19 games of the 2019-20 regular season. This turned out to be a far more minor issue, and following a full day off for the Leafs on Monday, Hyman was back for Tuesday’s practice on a line with Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner.

Leafs head coach Sheldon Keefe had shuffled Nick Robertson and John Tavares into Hyman’s place while he was out, but Hyman was only too happy to reclaim the post.

“We've had success this year,” Hyman said of the line’s chemistry. “Those two are so dynamic and they read off each other so well and they make such great plays. Mitch is an elite playmaker and Auston is an elite goalscorer, so I just try to go out there and get the puck to those guys as much as I can, go to the net, create some havoc and get it back and let those guys do their thing. The two of them together, it’s pretty special.”

Familiarity is especially critical now. Tuesday marked one of only four remaining days of scheduled on-ice activities for the Leafs before Phase 3 of the NHL’s Return To Play plan projects to move into Phase 4’s 24-team playoff tournament.

By Sunday, the Leafs should be quarantined at the Royal York Hotel ahead of facing Columbus in a qualifying-round series that opens Aug. 2 in Toronto.

That leaves precious little time for Hyman to make sure he’s up to speed, but Keefe still didn’t want to push his winger too soon. He included both Robertson and Pierre Engvall in the main sessions on Tuesday to allow Hyman an easy transition back into the fold, which turned out to be unnecessary.

“We had put an extra forward in our practice just to give Zach the freedom to take some reps off if he wasn't feeling good or needed a little bit of a break or didn't want to overwork it. But not to my surprise, he didn't take anything off,” Keefe said. “He just worked his way through it and pushed straight to the very end, and even the conditioning skate at the end, he was a real leader for us.”

This camp has been the first real opportunity for Keefe, a rookie head coach promoted to behind the Leafs’ bench in mid-November, to implement his own structures without the pressure of a regular-season calendar. That, coupled with the accelerated timeline of the NHL’s return, has made each session at Leafs’ camp seemingly more intense than the last.

Fortunately for Hyman, he has good habits to fall back on.

“Every day is really important here, but I'm less concerned about somebody like Zach,” Keefe said. “He first of all put in a lot of really good work in Phase 2 [voluntary workouts] and was probably ahead of most others here in just the natural worker that he is.”

The next step for Toronto is to start downloading the game plan against Columbus and preparing themselves for the unfamiliar schedules they’ll be seeing in Phase 4. Playoff games could be at noon, 4 p.m. or 8 p.m. ET, and practice times will often be in mid-afternoon. To that end, the Leafs will scrimmage later than usual on Wednesday and Thursday to get acclimated and allow players to adjust their pre-game preparations accordingly.

It may not seem like much, but the details are what could set Toronto up for success in the postseason, and ultimately make all the energy put into restarting the pandemic-shortened year worthwhile.

“I think we're used to being uncomfortable,” Hyman said. "This is a brand-new start. It's the playoffs, but it's unlike anything anybody's experienced. We had a layoff and now we're back at it, we're back at it with the same group we had, just a healthier group and we're excited. We're excited to get into the bubble and get things going.”