Minnesota Wild fourth-liner Ben Jones found himself in some unfamiliar territory late Saturday, as a crowd of media packed in around his locker stall for postgame interviews. The extra attention was warranted, as a few hours earlier, Jones had scored a goal in a NHL game for the first time.

It came in his 49th NHL game and less than 23 hours after he had been summoned from an Iowa Wild road trip in Arizona, making the trek halfway across the country to fill out the Minnesota line chart with second line center Joel Eriksson Ek unable to play.

“It was busy, but the best kind of busy,” said Jones, his postgame smile tampered a bit by the New York Islanders, who came back three times to beat the Wild 4-3 in overtime. “It would’ve been great to cap it off with a win, but obviously super excited to get the first one.”

And the fact that the scoresheet entry for that first one read, “Ben Jones from Brock Faber and Quinn Hughes” was perfectly appropriate as well. A little more than a decade ago, Jones and Hughes were youth hockey teammates in Toronto for a time.

“Quinn and I go way back. We played minor hockey together years and years ago,” Jones recounted. “He kept saying that he felt like he was going to be a part of the first one, and you know, he made it happen. So I was happy to see that.”

Jones joked that he had been saving up his goal celebration for 49 games, as he spent much of this season and last bouncing between Iowa and Minnesota. Even before he had gotten a puck with his name and the date emblazoned on it to keep forever, there were signs that Jones putting one in the net was an inevitability.

“He’s an extremely reliable player. He can come in and play that fourth line center role. He’s strong on faceoffs. His attention to detail is very strong offensively and defensively,” Wild coach John Hynes said before the Islanders game. “He does get a lot of scoring chances. …But the reason he gets those scoring chances is because he plays fast, and he understands the way we want to play and the areas you need to get to to get scoring chances.”

On Saturday, with Minnesota pressing the Islanders in the offensive zone early, Hughes fed the puck to Faber, who zipped a pass toward the net where Jones was waiting to redirect it low past New York goalie Illya Sorokin.

While Hughes rightly gave Faber primary credit for the play, he smiled at the opportunity to be there for an old youth hockey teammate from years ago. On their Toronto U16 team from the 2014-15 season, Jones and Hughes are among five players from that squad to play in the NHL.

“I think Brock made that play, and Jonesy was in the right spot,” Hughes said, after assisting on all three of the Wild’s goals on Saturday. “Life works like that. It was a weird one. I had a feeling that would happen, something like that.”

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