The gold medals are tucked away in carry-ons, the Italian espresso has been replaced by lukewarm gas station brew, and the Milano hangover has officially hit 14th Street. For the St. Louis Blues, the two-week Olympic break wasn’t a vacation. It was a stay of execution.

NHL players returned to the Five-and-Dime grind this week, and the vibes in the Gateway City are, predictably, subterranean. You can see it in the way the skates hit the ice—heavy. You can see it in the front office's eyes—calculating. The "best-on-best" tournament was a great commercial for international hockey, but for a team hovering in the agonizing purgatory of the Western Conference wildcard race, it just exposed the cracks in the foundation.

Here is what happens next. It won’t be pretty, and it certainly won’t be cheap.

First, Robert Thomas is going to hit a wall, and he’s taking the power play with him. Thomas spent his February logging high-leverage minutes for Team Canada, playing a style of hockey that demands a level of cognitive load the regular season rarely touches. Now he’s back. He’s the engine of this franchise, the $8.125 million man who is expected to carry a supporting cast that often looks like it’s skating through knee-deep molasses.

The friction is simple physics. You can’t ask a guy to peak in an Olympic gold medal game and then expect him to find the same emotional gear for a Tuesday night tilt against a tanking Anaheim Ducks squad. We’re going to see the "Olympic Dip." His vision will be a half-second slow. Those cross-seam passes will find shins instead of tape. Without Thomas operating at 100 percent, the Blues’ offense becomes a collection of perimeter shots and "hope-and-pray" rebounds. It’s a feature, not a bug, of a roster that relies too heavily on one or two creators to bridge the gap between mediocrity and the postseason.

Second, the Jordan Binnington situation is going to reach a fever pitch of awkwardness. Binnington went to Milano, sat on a bench, or maybe played a period, and watched the future of goaltending pass him by. Now he returns to a locker room where his $6 million cap hit is a constant conversation piece.

The trade-off is becoming untenable. Management wants to believe Binnington is the 2019 ghost who can steal a series, but the data suggests he’s a league-average starter with an elite-level contract. Post-Olympics, the pressure to "do something" will result in a messy internal conflict. Do they ride him into the dirt to justify the paycheck? Or do they start giving the kid, Joel Hofer, 60 percent of the starts? Expect a public blow-up or a very pointed "coach's decision" by mid-March. The Blues have a goaltending logjam that isn’t about talent; it’s about the stubbornness of a front office that hates admitting a contract has gone stale.

Finally, Doug Armstrong is going to stop pretending this is a "retool" and start using the "R" word: Rebuild. Or, more accurately, he’s going to sell off the furniture to pay the heating bill. The Olympics acted as a scouting combine for the rest of the league. GMs were in the same luxury boxes for two weeks, whispering about depth defensemen and veteran wingers who can provide "grit" for a playoff run.

The Blues have those pieces. They’re currently overpaying for them. Justin Faulk and Torey Krug aren’t getting younger, and their contracts are anchors in a league that is getting faster every time someone blinks. One of them is going. The friction here is the No-Trade Clause—the ultimate tech-debt of the NHL world. Armstrong is going to have to attach a draft pick or eat 50 percent of a salary just to get someone to take a veteran blueliner off his hands. It’s a fire sale where the seller has to pay the buyer to haul the junk away.

The city wants to believe that the Olympic break was a reset button. A chance to heal, to find some chemistry, to make a frantic push for the eighth seed. It wasn’t. It was a magnifying glass. It showed that the stars are tired, the middle class is overpaid, and the prospects are still a zip code away.

The Blues aren’t a team on the rise. They are a legacy system running on outdated firmware, trying to compete in a league that just upgraded its hardware in Italy. If you’re looking for a miracle run to the Cup, you might want to check the secondary market for a different jersey.

Does anyone actually believe a 32-year-old defenseman with a bum ankle is the missing piece for a contender, or are we all just participating in the same collective delusion to keep the ticket sales up?