Jared Spurgeon looked a little worse for wear after playing his first game of the season on Friday in Buffalo, N.Y., but by NHL standards, he was healthy — just a healthy fat lip after being hit by a Casey Mittelstadt stick.

“Right back into it,” he said after the Wild’s 3-2 loss to the Sabres at KeyBank Center. “My modeling career is over.”

It was the Wild’s 14th game of the season, and patterns have developed for Minnesota, most notably slow starts, inconsistent play and defensive lapses — by forwards and blue liners — that have so far added up to a 5-7-2 start.

For Spurgeon, it was new, and with him back in the lineup, the Wild played the kind of game they typically play and have, more often than not, won the past several seasons. So, when the team captain was asked if the Wild need a reset, Spurgeon was a little incredulous.

“It’s early in the year,” he said. “We’ve just got to keep with it and correct those things. Obviously, we’d like to come out with a win here, end a good road trip, but we’ve got to look forward to the next one.”

He has a point. The Wild’s next game, a 5 p.m. puck drop Sunday against Dallas at Xcel Energy Center, is their first against a Central Division opponent this season, and just their third against a Western Conference team. The Stars (8-3-1) lead the eight-team division; the Wild are sixth.

There is no doubt Spurgeon improves the Wild’s prospects of making the playoffs for a fourth straight full NHL season. The team has been waiting for him to heal from an upper-body injury suffered when checked into the boards in an Oct. 5 preseason game at Chicago.

Spurgeon skated off the ice pretty typically after the hit, and even shoved the guy who hit him, Reese Johnson, on his way. But he said Friday it was immediately clear it might be serious.

“I think right away we sort of had an idea, but then you go for a scan and see it,” Spurgeon said. “So, I think it was two days after that we sort of had an idea of what was going on. … It was definitely frustrating.”

It was the fifth of Minnesota’s six preseason games.

“You go through training camp, and see the light that’s the regular season, and to have something like this happen, it’s always tough,” Spurgeon said. “But the guys have been battling. You never want to watch hockey when you’re part of a team.”

Trainers got Spurgeon back to skating in about two weeks, and he returned to practice on Nov. 1. He played 21 minutes, 52 seconds in Friday’s loss and made his presence felt, playing 1:10 on power plays and 4:10 on four successful penalty kills.

He also nearly tied the game in the closing seconds when, with goaltender Filip Gustavsson pulled, he deflected a puck that hit the left post.

“He was great. He was great in every aspect,” head coach Dean Evason said. “He hits a post at the end. It’s too bad he, and we, didn’t get rewarded for that. But he did exactly what Jared Spurgeon does.”

Spurgeon joined a blue line that in his absence traded offense-minded defenseman Calen Addison to San Jose and replaced him with heavy veteran Zach Bogosian, who has played well in his two games since joining the team on the road trip. Their presence should help a team that has allowed 55 goals in 14 games, second worst in the NHL behind only the 2-11-1 Sharks’ 62.

“It just seems like one play that we don’t need to make at that certain time, or just a chance that we have that we don’t put in that could change the game,” Spurgeon said. “But as a group we need to look at the positives that we did. I think we’re a pretty smart group in here, a veteran group, and we realize what we need to change and what needs to be done.”