from Mark Lazerus of the Chicago Sun-Times,

There wasn’t one particular “welcome back” moment for Kimmo Timonen — a time when a forward blew by him, or when his legs couldn’t keep up with his thought process, or when his timing failed him at an inopportune moment.

There were lots of them.

“All four games I’ve played so far,” Timonen said with a laugh. “You get that feeling: ‘Oh, my God. I’ve got a long ways to go.’ ”

Timonen wasn’t expecting this to be easy. He turns 40 on Wednesday, so he knows how this works by now. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to step on the ice for the first time in 10 months after dealing with potentially life-threatening blood clots in his calf and both lungs and immediately be his old self — a four-time All-Star, a minutes-eater, a top-tier power-play point man, a penalty-killer.

But he didn’t think it was going to be this difficult, either. Four games into his Blackhawks career, Timonen has seen his ice time drop every game, from 17:29 on March 2 to a mere 9:21 on Friday night in Arizona.

“It’s been hard,” he said. “The game’s fast, and everything happens fast, and everybody’s fighting for the playoffs. It’s not like Game 30, when everybody’s kind of sluggish. It’s all-out now for everybody. So it’s been hard. It’s going to take time. When I came here, I gave myself 19 games to get in the shape I want to be in when we get to the playoffs. We’ve still got 15 games to go.”

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