When well-compensated professional athletes get dinner on the road, they’re generally not going out for fast food burgers or hitting a popular taco truck. Teams like the Minnesota Wild treat their employees to first class, and high-end dining with teammates at some of the finest restaurants across North America an off-day ritual.

For the Wild that meant hitting some serious culinary destinations in Las Vegas, Southern California and most recently Seattle —and after two weeks on the road, at least one of them admitted being over it.

“I think the dinners the night before games are obviously one of the best things, but sometimes you get sick of the same six or seven guys seeing them every night at six o’clock,” Wild defenseman Brock Faber said late Thursday after posting a goal and overtime assist in a 3-2 victory over the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena.

The win closed out a seven-game road trip that coincided with the World Junior Championship being held at Grand Casino Arena. That tied the franchise record for the longest road trip, but the 14 consecutive days away from home were a new record in the team’s 25-year history.

Faber admitted that he was looking forward to his own kitchen and a chance to cook and eat a meal in the comforts of home.

Things went well on the ice, though. Minnesota comes home with the second-best record in the NHL, trailing only Colorado, after going 4-1-2 in their seven games away. A 4-2 loss in Los Angeles on Monday — their third game in four days — was the only time the Wild didn’t earn at least a point.

And one of the only times that a true sense of road weariness seemed to creep in.

“It’s been a long one, but obviously up until this one I thought we’d been doing a good job getting points on the road here and it’s never easy coming into a road building,” Wild captain Jared Spurgeon said following the loss to the Kings.

After playing roughly every other day for the first six games, the Wild got an extra day off in Seattle, well-known for its rain and cloudy gloom.

“I heard Seattle this time of the year is really nice,” Wild forward Nico Sturm said, sarcastically, before the team boarded a plane for the Pacific Northwest. To be fair, the trip began in frigid Winnipeg, and included three days of rain in normally sunny Southern California.

They arrived at Climate Pledge Arena, in the shadow of the Space Needle, on Thursday to close the road trip by facing a Kraken team that was on a 8-0-1 heater. The visitors promptly jumped out to a 2-0 first period lead and pushed hard in the second to put the game away. Seattle stormed back to tie it in the third, any notion that the Wild were going to be happy with a road point was quickly dispelled.

Minnesota was the clear aggressor for the last 10 minutes of regulation, and outshot Seattle 4-0 in overtime, ending it on a Mats Zuccarello goal after a set-up pass from Kirill Kaprizov. Of a possible 14 points on the trip, the Wild loaded 10 of them onto their eastbound plane Friday morning.

Per the numbers-crunching website MoneyPuck.com, the Wild’s odds of making the playoffs stand at 99.8%.

For Wild coach John Hynes, the mental and physical re-set after the loss in Los Angeles was the key to finding their legs late and not letting the trip’s finale slip away.

“I thought they handled the two (off) days the right way,” the coach said. “I think to have the success that we’ve had on the trip, with the amount of things that have gone on, they handled themselves the right way and when they were ready to come to work, they came to work.

“And most importantly, this was going to be a little bit of that mindset game: Make sure that we’re where our feet are. And I thought our guys responded and delivered tonight.”

After all of the planes and busses and hotels and fine dining and winning, the Wild’s feet are finally back in the State of Hockey. For the next three games anyway, starting Saturday against the New York Islanders. Puck drop is set for 7 p.m.

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