"Following the final horn at the NHL All-Star Game on Sunday, 29 teams have returned to the ice. Twenty-three teams will have played twice before the Blues play once. After a nine-day layoff, the longest in the league, the club will be back in action tonight against Los Angeles.

"They have let us back in the league," Blues coach Ken Hitchcock joked Thursday. "We're able to play."

Now it's time to fasten your seat belt.

The Blues' race for a Western Conference playoff seed will include 33 games in the final 65 days of the regular season. They will have back-to-back days off only twice this month, and their longest break over the next 2½ months will be three days.

"It goes fast," Hitchcock said. "There's going to be days you wake up and you think you're never going to win again and there's going to be days you think you can never lose. You're just going to have to deal with it."

The Blues, who are 29-13-7 for 65 points, haven't been in this position since the 2003-2004 season. In the past six years, they have advanced to the playoffs once, in 2008-09, but at this point in that season they were 20-24-5 for 45 points and needed a miracle finish to qualify.

This time, the Blues aren't playing catch-up. They're in fifth place in the Western Conference going into Thursday's games and trying to put more than 10 points between them and the eighth-place team.

"It's good, but it's still going to be a difficult road to the playoffs," Blues assistant captain Barret Jackman said. "This is the time of year where everybody steps up their game and points are going to be hard to come by. We've got to stay focused and realize what got us to this point and continue to claw and fight for every win."