TORONTO -- We're in Toronto. We've arrived. And we feel the tournament atmosphere now.
You see the banners outside, the World Cup banners, and everybody knows we're going to play hockey here and it's going to be a fun tournament, fun to watch every team, every game, and it's going to matter. It's exciting to finally be here.
I felt it was for real this morning when I woke up. I looked outside and I was in Toronto, and it's going to start soon.
We had three pretournament games and we tried to win every game. We did our best and lost two of them, but now we're counting the points so it's a little bit different. It just feels different now.
After three games, with a win against Team Sweden in our opener, and back-to-back losses against Team Sweden and Team USA, I feel OK. We had a lot of good stuff going on in the games but then we had some bad periods, fell asleep for a moment and they score on us. The last two games we were down 3-0 and we don't want to do that again. We want to play our own game right from the start, be close to each other.
But, like I said, we did have a lot of good stuff to take away. We were down 3-0 in our last two games and we almost tied the game both times. That's a sign of a good team. I think we are a good team and we have good potential. If we do our best we're going to have a pretty good chance to succeed.
Now that we're here, we still have to wait to play. We don't open the tournament until our game against Team North America on Sunday. It's a lot of time still to go before we get to that game, but we'll take a patient approach.
We practiced Wednesday and we'll have a day off Thursday before we practice again Friday and Saturday. It'll be good for us because we had a pretty tough schedule playing two games in Europe and then traveling to Washington before playing [Tuesday] night. We need a little rest right now.
We'll get together, maybe go for dinner somewhere, relax and then get back to work to do our best. It still feels like we're jetlagged, at least some of the guys, even though we arrived in D.C. on Sunday. It'll be good to get some rest.
