Maybe more importantly, Bergeron felt like himself the following morning. He awoke Friday feeling no lingering aftereffects and participated in the Bruins' practice Friday afternoon at the St. Pete Times Forum.
"I'm feeling good," Bergeron said after the workout. "I'm feeling 100 percent, no issues."
Bergeron's health was good enough to even get a joke out of coach Claude Julien, who had grown weary of the daily questions seeking updates on Bergeron's status for the past couple weeks.
"Well, he's a question mark for [Saturday]. If you see him in the warm-up, it's because he's playing," Julien joked of Saturday's Game 4 in Tampa before quickly adding, "He's fine."
Both Bergeron and Julien were in good spirits after the center's return helped the club to a 2-0 win in Game 3 and a 2-1 series lead. Bergeron jumped right back into his usual role, logging 19:13 of ice time with a pair of shots and another dominant performance on faceoffs, winning 18 of 28 draws (64 percent).
"I really felt that Patrice looked like a guy who hadn't missed a step," Julien said. "And you would never have known that he almost spent two weeks without playing a game. And as he said to me yesterday, first period, maybe with the puck, too, he didn't feel quite comfortable. But as the game went on, he just seemed to find the groove. You could tell just by his skating, by his battles and everything else, that he really felt good. And to us, to me anyway, watching him from behind the bench, he looked like a guy who never missed a game.
"He was right where he left off," Julien added. "I thought that was pretty impressive of him to be able to come back that way. … He wasn't cautious. He was confident. He knew he felt good. He knew he was OK and he went out there and played like nothing happened."
Bergeron admitted that he did need a few shifts to get back into that groove, but it didn't take long and he wasn't worried about getting back to his old self.
"I was just trying to keep things simple, get back in the game and get that timing back, but I wasn't worried about anything," Bergeron said. "I was more just trying to get back into it. I felt good right away and it was good to be back out there helping the team."
By the time he returned to game action on Thursday, Bergeron was confident he would be fine. But having already suffered two more serious concussions earlier in his career, Bergeron did admit that he was initially concerned about how long he would be out when he suffered his latest concussion in Game 4 against the Flyers.
"You never know, there's always the unknown with that type of injury," Bergeron said. "I'm very happy with the way it turned out, but I knew it wasn't close to the previous ones I had gotten."
