It’s not that road wins are getting to be old hat for the Minnesota Wild, but if their postgame celebration after a 3-1 victory in San Jose on Saturday night seemed brief or muted, it was for two good reasons.

First, a secret to their overall success this season is to never get too high after wins or too low after losses. And second, they had to prepare for another road game, in another state, roughly 20 hours later.

The Wild won for the seventh time in their past nine games on the strength of Mats Zuccarello setting up goals by Marco Rossi and Matt Boldy, then scoring an empty-net goal himself. At 16-3-3 away from home, the Wild hold the NHL’s top road record.

“We got good goaltending. I thought we defended hard. Probably defended a little but too much, more than we would like, but sometimes that’s how games go,” John Hynes told reporters at SAP Center. “You still have to grind out and find a way to win it, and we did that tonight.”

Marc-Andre Fleury had 36 saves for the Wild in the latest entry of his rollercoaster week. On Tuesday, he came on in relief of Filip Gustavsson in a come-from-behind win over St. Louis. Two nights later, Fleury was so floored by an illness that he could only stay on the team bench for two periods as Gustavsson played, and lost, versus Colorado.

“He played well,” Zuccarello said, tipping his cap to Fleury. “We didn’t play that well, but sometimes it’s nice to win on not a great day. We’ll take it and move on.”

Making his 12th start of the season and his 14th appearance, Fleury improved to 9-3-1. The Wild were again playing without four of their top names as star forward Kirill Kaprizov, and defensemen Brock Faber, Jonas Brodin and Jared Spurgeon, are all in various stages of recovery from injury and did not travel for the two-game road trip.

The Wild killed a first-period penalty and managed just a half-dozen shots on goal, but one of them was a thing of beauty. Zuccarello’s long lead pass, and a Sharks defender that fell down, gave Rossi an unobstructed route to the San Jose net, and the center popped a backhander past goalie Yaroslav Askarov for a 1-0 lead after 20 minutes.

On the other end of the rink, Fleury was brilliant, as San Jose fired 16 pucks his way, and the veteran turned them all aside.

“In the first, they came out pretty hard. You could see they were buzzing in their zone, too, a bit,” Fleury said to the reporters in San Jose. “It was nice that we got the lead. Marco with a big goal, then you have a little playing room, which was good.”

Zuccarello played set-up man again early in the second, passing to Boldy, who used Sharks defenseman Henry Thrun as a screen and fired a low shot that eluded Askarov. For Boldy, who had an assist on the first goal of the game, it was also the 16th goal of the season, moving him into a tie with Rossi for second place on the team’s scoring chart behind Kaprizov’s 23.

San Jose answered late in the second period when Fleury made a toe save only to see the rebound popped in to cut the Wild’s lead in half going into the final frame. Rossi had a breakaway midway through the third but was thwarted by Askarov, who finished with 18 saves.

It was Minnesota’s second and final trip to San Jose for the season. The Wild won there, 5-2, on Nov. 7, while the Sharks come to Minnesota for their only visit of the year on April 9. Askarov finished with 18 saves for San Jose.

The Wild’s two-game western road swing concludes on Sunday night with a 7 p.m. CT start versus the Golden Knights in Las Vegas. The Knights won the only meeting between these teams thus far this season, a 3-2 victory by the visitors in St. Paul on Dec. 15.

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