It took until a skate in mid-July for Marc Staal to finally feel a semblance of normalcy.
The Rangers’ blue-chip defenseman had been suffering the aftereffects of a severe right-eye injury that occurred in early March, and skating with his brothers Jordan and Jared in their hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Marc finally could take the ice without hesitation.
“I went out with Jordan and Jared for a skate, and after the skate I realized I hadn’t thought about [the eye] once,” Staal told NHL.com on Tuesday, when he was in Calgary for the first orientation meeting of Canada’s Olympic tryouts.
“While I was doing all the drills, quick drills, things like that, my focus wasn’t on thinking about what I was doing. It was more about just doing it,” Staal continued. “Right after that skate I was like, ‘OK, this is going to be fine.’”
Staal reiterated what he said on the Rangers’ breakup day in May: Doctors have told him his eye will never return to 100 percent, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be able to regain his All-Star form.
Yet after receiving such a drastic and sudden scare, the result of a deflected Kimmo Timonen slapshot that struck him squarely above the eye, Staal was never fully confident in the doctors’ rosy outlook. Only naturally, he Staal feared the worst. Until last month, when he finally saw and felt like things were getting back to normal.
“When you’re sitting in the doctor’s office and he tells you your eye probably won’t come back to normal, that was a hard day,” said Staal, who will be in Rangers’ training camp the second week of September and who, if fully healthy, has a good chance to be an impact player for the Canadian Olympic team come February. “That was about a week-and-a-half after [the injury]. They told me originally that I would be all right, but once the blood started flushing out of there they started to see a little more damage.
“The next thing he said is, ‘You’re still going to play’,” Staal continued. “But you still don’t know if you’re going to get back to that level, and obviously that’s what I have to prove. I’m anxious to do that.”
bcyrgalis@nypost.com