There’s an effortlessness with which superstar defenseman Quinn Hughes controls a game whenever the puck is on his stick.

You have to see it in person to truly appreciate it.

That’s something the Wild have experienced firsthand since acquiring the 26-year-old last month. That’s something the Calgary Flames experienced firsthand as they struggled to keep up with him this week.

Though the game between the Wild and the Flames on Thursday night at Grand Casino Arena was borderline unwatchable for much of the 60 minutes, Hughes continued to prove that he’s always going to be worth the price of admission.

Just ask Flames winger Adam Klapka.

On a few different occasions, Hughes used his shiftiness to shake Klapka out of his skates, breaking ankles as if he were playing pickup on the blacktop. You almost started to feel bad for Klapka as he continuously peeled himself off the ice while struggling to keep up.

There’s a majesty to the way Hughes plays the game. It extends far beyond when he’s actually scoring points for the Wild. He has an aura about him that very few players in the NHL can replicate.

That’s precisely why general manager Bill Guerin moved heaven and earth to get him. He didn’t care about the price the Wild had to pay. Not when he found out that the Vancouver Canucks had actually put Hughes on the table.

Whether it’s his patented spin move that makes life miserable for his opponents, or his unmatched vision that makes life easier for his teammates, Hughes transforms the way the Wild play every time he hops over the boards.

That’s a a reason the Wild boasted a 13-5-5 recorded with Hughes in the lineup heading into the matchup with the Edmonton Oilers on Saturday night at Rogers Place. There’s no doubt that the Wild have taken their game to another level since acquiring him, looking very much like a legitimate Stanley Cup contender.

The impact Hughes already has made can’t be overstated. He had recorded 27 points (2 goals, 25 assists) in 23 games with the Wild before playing the Oilers. He doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

His numbers in January alone are staggering; 19 assists before the Wild played the Oilers. That was already a franchise record for assists by a defenseman in a single month, and Hughes has another 60 minutes to add to that total.

It’s not hyperbole to say the Wild have never had a player on the blue line as good as Hughes in his current form.

As good as star defenseman Brent Burns was at the peak of his powers, he didn’t reach elite status until after the Wild traded him.

As good as star defenseman Ryan Suter was in his prime, he was never the prolific scorer the Wild needed him to be.

As good as star defenseman Jared Spurgeon has been for the past decade, he hasn’t always moved the needle for the Wild in the biggest moments.

That’s no longer the case with Hughes in the mix. He’s everything the Wild have been missing. It’s why the prospects of them finally getting over the hump and winning the Stanley Cup have never felt more realistic.

Fittingly, with the Wild struggling to put the Flames away this week, it was Hughes that ignited a tic-tac-toe sequence out of thin air that proved to be the difference. On a power play late in the game, Hughes snapped a pass to winger Kirill Kaprizov, who slid the puck to winger Matt Boldy, who scored a goal that provided some much needed insurance in the 4-1 win.

Maybe the scariest part for the rest of the NHL? It seems Hughes is getting more dominant as he continues to get more comfortable with the talent around him.

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Iowa’s domination of Minnesota wrestling is over.

The Gophers upset fourth-ranked Iowa 21-16 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Friday to snap an 11-match losing streak against the Hawkeyes. It was Minnesota’s first win over its rival since 2014.

The key wins for seventh-ranked Minnesota were a pair of upsets from Drew Roberts at 149 pounds and Charlie Millard at 157 pounds.

Minnesota led 15-13 heading into the 184 pound match, where Max McEnelly scored a sudden victory over Gabe Arnold for the second straight year. McEnelly has now won nine straight matches and is 14-1 on the season.

Gavin Nelson won at 197 pounds to officially put the dual on ice.

The Gophers have a pair of road duals next weekend, wrestling at Rutgers on Friday and at Maryland on Sunday, Feb. 8.

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Avery Hovland tied the score in the third period, and Molly Jordan scored in overtime as the third-ranked Gophers beat top-ranked Wisconsin, 3-2, on Friday at Ridder Arena.

Sydney Morrow opened the scoring for the Gophers just 3 minutes, 47 seconds into the opening period with her seventh goal of the season. Jamie Nelson lifted a Badger stick to free the puck before finding Ava Lindsay in the low slot; Lindsay fed Morrow for a one-timer to give Minnesota a 1-0 lead after one period.

Wisconsin responded with two goals late in the second period before Hovland picked up a loose puck in the neutral zone, slipped past a defender, and snapped a wrist shot glove-side high to tie the game at 2-2 with 9:27 remaining in regulation.

The Gophers (23-4-0 overall, 17-4-0 WCHA) are the only team to beat the Badgers (23-2-2, 17-2-2) this season. The teams meet again Saturday afternoon at Ridder.

“We’re really proud of our group, the way they stepped up, competed with one another, and stayed with it,” Gophers coach Brad Frost said.

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By HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) — From her house up high in Colorado’s Elk Mountains, author Shelley Read can only look out in amazement at the worldwide success of her debut novel, “Go as a River.”

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“There were upward of 30 translations already secured before the novel was introduced in the U.S.,” says Read, a fifth-generation Coloradan who lives with her husband in Crested Butte, in a home they built themselves. “And that is when I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ It’s thrilling, scary, magnificent.”

Published in 2023 by Spiegel & Grau, “Go as a River” received little major review attention beyond trade publications when first released and its honors are mostly regional, including a High Plains Book Award and a Reading the West Book Award. But her novel has been a hit in the U.S. and well beyond, appearing on bestseller lists everywhere from North America to Scandinavia and selling more than 1 million copies. Mazur Kaplan, co-founded by producer Paula Mazur and independent book seller Mitchell Kaplan, is working on a film adaptation. Eliza Hittman, whose credits include the award-winning “Never Rarely Sometimes Only,” is expected to direct.

Read’s 300-page novel spans from the 1940s to the 1970s, and centers on a 17-year-old Colorado farm girl’s ill-fated romance with an itinerant Indigenous man and how it haunts and changes lives for decades to come. “Go as a River” proves that some books can break through without high-profile endorsements or author name recognition. It also adds the 61-year-old Read to a special list of first-time authors — from Frank McCourt to Louis Begley — middle aged or older who finally get around to that book they had been meaning to write and receive wide acclaim.

“What she’s done is unusual,” says Spiegel & Grau co-founder Cindy Spiegel. “Every now and then someone comes along who has a vision that they’ve held for many, many years and they really do write it down. Most people don’t.”

A native of Colorado Springs, Read is a graduate of the University of Denver who has a master’s degree from Temple University’s creative writing program. She is a longtime educator who parsed and absorbed so many books, with works by Virginia Woolf and Czeslaw Milosz among her favorites, that one of her own inevitably came out on the other end.

A teacher with a story of her own

For nearly three decades, she taught writing and literature among other subjects at Western Colorado University. During that time, a character kept turning up in her thoughts, the germ of what became her novel’s protagonist, Victoria Nash. There was something about Victoria, an empathetic quality, Read related to. But she had her career and two young children, and “was just trying to keep my head above water as a super busy mom and with a lot of very intense challenges.”

With Victoria unwilling to leave her be, Read began jotting down notes on Post-its, napkins and other papers that might be around. With her husband’s encouragement, she took early retirement and committed to completing her book. She had written stories in her early years, but had never attempted a full-length narrative.

“I had no idea where it was going. I had no intentions about where it was going, because I had never written a novel before,” Read says, speaking via Zoom from her home. “Once I figured out this was going to be a novel, I was like, ‘Oh no!’ I have studied novels thousands of times throughout my life, but I never even considered that I would write one.”

Read stepped down in 2018 and by the following year had finished a manuscript, drawn in part from such historical events as a 1960s flood in Iola, Colorado, and from her lifelong affinity for the local landscape. First-time authors of any age struggle to find representation, but during a 2017 writers conference at Western Colorado University, Read had met Sandra Bond, a Denver-based agent. A “Colorado girl,” Bond calls herself.

“We hit it off immediately,” Bond says. “We have very similar backgrounds in growing up in Colorado.”

Writing is rewriting

Read’s manuscript “knocked my socks off,” Bond remembers, but it wasn’t an easy sell. The second half of the book “didn’t quite meet the standards of the first” and Bond didn’t have the editing skills to fix it. “Go as a River” was turned down by 21 publishers before Spiegel signed it up. Spiegel & Grau, which began as a Penguin Random House imprint and reopened in 2020 as an independent a year after PRH shut it down amid a corporate reorganization, has worked with authors ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sara Gruen to Iain Pears and Kathryn Stockett.

“I had a feeling Cindy might be able to see how to guide Shelley in revising the second half — what was really working and what wasn’t and why,” Bond says.

Spiegel and Read worked on revisions — the finished version is entirely from Victoria’s perspective; the original draft shifted narrators midway. Meanwhile, the publisher showed the manuscript to the international agent Susanna Lea, who “read it one sitting” and quickly arranged for meetings with foreign publishers. It was mid-July, and she remembers tracking down publishers in Norway and Finland and other parts of Scandinavia at a time of year when book executives usually are on vacation.

“Suddenly, they were all reachable,” she says.

Read is working on a second novel, set in southeastern Colorado, where her homesteader-grandparents lived. Meanwhile, royalties from “Go as a River” allowed her a few indulgences, from installing solar panels on her house to a little travel, not to mention paying off college tuition for her son and building up the family retirement savings.

“Not too sexy,” she acknowledges. “We’re still do-it-yourselfers, & I still drive an old Toyota pickup. The main thing about the royalties is that I get to be a writer for a living, and that is a dream come true.”