You can forgive Yanni Kaldis if he spent a little bit more time at home in Canada around Christmas than usual. After all, he and his Cornell teammates didn’t have an actual game scheduled for an entire month.
“I did get to go home this year,” said the Montreal native in mid-January. “We got some extra time off to rest our bodies, and then we skated a few times over the break and came back rejuvenated.”
After the Big Red recorded a 2-1 win at Harvard on Dec. 1, Cornell didn’t officially suit up again until Jan. 4, in a 3-2 victory at Princeton. The leading scorer among team defensemen, Kaldis didn’t record a point in either of those contests, but admitted that getting back into the swing of things in ECAC Hockey wasn’t as easy as just strapping on skates again.
“We definitely had rust, and Princeton had played (recently) before,” he remembered. “You try to simulate in practice and compete, but you can’t really simulate an actual game, and there was definitely some rust.”