BUFFALO, N.Y. — Avery Hayes took scoring two goals in his NHL debut in stride.

“It was a ton of fun,” Hayes said. “It was a moment I will never forget.”

Nor will anyone who witnessed what the 23-year-old forward pulled off on Thursday night in a 5-2 victory against the Buffalo Sabres at KeyBank Center.

Hayes found out less than seven hours before the opening faceoff he had been called up to the Penguins to fill in as a warm body after Blake Lizotte (paternity leave), Rickard Rakell (lower body injury) and Noel Acciari (undisclosed illness) were deemed out. He didn’t know until he was halfway from Wilkes-Barre to Buffalo that he was even going to dress and not be a healthy scratch.

Yet with all that swirling around, he joined Rob Brown and Jake Guentzel as the only Penguins ever to score two goals in their NHL debut. Hayes was also the first to do so on the road as well as the first to accomplish the feat in a victory.

But with the league headed into a three-week break so NHL players can once again participate in the Olympics, Hayes’ stay with the Penguins was short-lived. To make sure he continues to develop his game against live competition, he was sent back down to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton on Friday. His good buddy, Rutger McGroarty, was also sent to the American Hockey League club.

Hayes certainly left an impression.

“We’ll have some conversations to have,” Penguins coach Dan Muse said. “But obviously with the break coming up we want him to play.”

Hayes isn’t the only player who has his Olympic break agenda set. Outside of the four Penguins who will represent their respective countries, Sidney Crosby (Canada), Rickard Rakell and Erik Karlsson (Sweden) and Arturs Silovs (Latvia), most of the players will, in fact, take some time away from the game and recuperate.

Bryan Rust, though, wishes he was heading for Milan to play for Team USA instead of Turks & Caicos with his wife and then to Florida for a family vacation with their children. After a career-year last season when he finished with 31 goals and 65 points, the 33-year-old forward is third on the Penguins with 19 goals and fourth with 40 points this year.

“First of all, I would have liked to have been doing something else during this break, but unfortunately that didn’t happen,” Rust said. “I think I’ll just kind of manage this break and manage the time off because that’s key.”

Rust isn’t the only one headed out of the country. Thomas Novak is bound for a beach in the Bahamas but will sojourn back to Pittsburgh well before the team’s Feb. 26 home date against New Jersey.

“It kind of feels like a reset with everybody taking that much time off,” Novak said. “You just try to stay in the best shape you can. Obviously, we have a week of practice before it starts back up but it’s a little bit of a reset for sure.”

It’s almost a full restart. Having three full weeks off between games — the Olympics will take up approximately two weeks — and the NHL expects players to return in time to have approximately seven days back with their teams prior to the resumption of play.

“It is a crazy schedule this year,” forward Anthony Mantha said. “The regular schedule is 190 days, we had 10 days to play two games in Sweden which takes us down to 180 and now we’ve got 21 days in this break, so we’re playing 80 games in 160 days.”

Mantha will be headed to Florida with his wife, who is 31 weeks pregnant, as the couple expects their third daughter. He is also a proponent of making a lengthy break part of the regular schedule.

“I think it’s good for a physical break but also as a mental break,” Mantha said. “We’re in a grind for so long. You have three days at Christmas and it kind of relaxes everything and then you have a break like this one for the final 25 games of the season. It’s going to be good.”

If there is a drawback to having a layoff of this length it is the erosion of chemistry between linemates. Though the players will have a week to get back on track, sometimes it can be difficult for even longtime teammates to jump right back into sync at a moment’s notice.

“I think this break’s a little longer than usual, but in years past we’d have the all-star break and the last [two] years the break was a little longer,” Novak said. “It will maybe take a couple of shifts to get our rhythm back, but I think it will be good for us.”

Still, even with that much time away from the rink, players plan to make sure they don’t lose their edge. The Penguins had, in fact, won seven of their last nine games heading into the stoppage.

“Guys who were going good and they’re confident about their game, it’s a time to rest but also will have time to rekindle that,” Rust said. “The guys who haven’t had the year they wanted and not playing the way they want to recently, it’s a time to get your game back going in the right direction.”

It’s also not like they won’t have a vested interest in what will be taking place in Milan.

“I’ll watch a fair share,” Mantha said. “I usually watch a lot of the Olympics and I woke up [Thursday] morning and I was watching my sister refereeing France against Italy women’s hockey, so I was tuning in already. I’ll be watching.”

Even Rust, who is still irked at the snub, knows he won’t be able to shut it out.

“I say I won’t pay much attention, but I’ll probably be glued to it,” Rust said. “I’ll be fairly invested.”