The past week has not been easy for Backes. He was injured and had to worry about his health. He watched the 2017 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic, a game he missed by a year with both the Bruins and the Blues. He contemplated not playing in a game he had long anticipated.
He thought about the people he would miss.
He won't have to miss them.
"I've had so many people reach out to me already to ask me what my time's being consumed by while I'm in town and trying to reconnect and all those great relationships that we made while we were there, trying to get a little piece of that," Backes said.
"It's kind of analogous to my wedding day, when you've got 300 people that you want to spend time with, all of them at once, but you only have so much time to allocate and how you're going to divvy that up. In the end, I imagine it's going to be a similar feeling where it's like, whew, that went by so fast. I didn't get to talk to that person or that person or that person. In the end, it's enjoyable, but it's never long enough to really connect again with everybody that was so kind to me in 10 years."
That was why, Backes joked, he and his wife had videographers at their wedding. Maybe, he added, he'll have to get one of the Bruins' staff members, a video producer, to follow him around with a camera. Maybe he'll need that to process everything.
He knows, in the end, there's one thing that will get him, one thing he will have to fight against. Teams tend to do video tributes to former players, to recognize their moments, big and small with the team. When he thinks about that, Backes said, "I'm going to try not to cry."
He thinks of everything he gave to the Blues, everything his wife gave too. He thinks about what it might mean to see himself on the video board, to see his wife there, to see what he meant to the community and what it meant to him.
"That might put me over the top, no matter what's happening in the moment," Backes said. "May need a couple shifts off from Claude [Julien]."
Maybe a tissue stashed on the bench, it is suggested.
"Maybe," he said, "a full Gatorade towel."