DENVER — On the morning of Game 6 of the Minnesota Wild’s first-round series against the Dallas Stars, Wild forward Marcus Foligno was asked by KFAN’s Paul Allen why Wild players hadn’t retaliated for Stars captain Jamie Benn’s indiscretions against Matt Boldy and Ryan Hartman.

“He doesn’t want to fight,” Foligno said. “We’ve asked him numerous times, so we know that, for sure.”

The comment went semi-viral, and you could tell after the Wild eliminated the Stars later that night that Foligno felt a little bad for having said it.

Foligno has great respect for Benn and the career he has had in Dallas. Foligno was just trying to explain how the Wild, and especially himself, had matured over the years and realized that in the playoffs, it’s important to play hard yet disciplined and not become unglued and run around chasing vigilante justice.

In the Wild’s 2023 first-round loss to the Stars, Foligno’s lid did pop too often. He spent too much time in the penalty box, was kicked out of one game (good call or not) and it ended up hurting his team.

“Listen, he’s a great player,” Foligno said after Thursday’s 5-2 win when The Athletic asked about his comments on KFAN. “He’s elite, and he plays both sides. I have a lot of respect for guys like that. That’s a game that we always envisioned playing. My dad always made us watch guys that played both sides in the playoffs, and it’s emotional that way. You want to be emotionally invested, and Jamie Benn plays that way.

“I just try to protect our guys, right? He’s going to do the same thing. There’s ways of getting in guys’ heads. There’s a game within the game. But I learned a lot from him, too, in the past series, with him not obliging and just playing that physical style and just skating away from it. It was good to be on the other side of it now.”

That will have to continue in this second-round series against the Colorado Avalanche.

The Avs and the Stars are very different teams, but one common denominator is Colorado’s star power and how it can bite the Wild if they march to the penalty box. Now, the Avs’ power play was lousy in the regular season and only had one goal against the Los Angeles Kings in a first-round sweep. Dallas’ power play was historically good (best in franchise history, 11th-best all-time in the regular season) and scored 10 times against Minnesota in the first round.

But any time a power play possesses Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Martin Necas, Gabriel Landeskog and Nazem Kadri, discipline will be paramount — no matter what the previous power-play numbers state.

The Wild very much plan to use the template they beat Dallas with in this series: play hard and physical, but don’t go over the line.

That means finishing checks, arriving on time, being clean with those checks, and then hoping as the series goes on that Avs forwards and defensemen start looking over their shoulders and want no more of it. The Wild had 219 hits in the first round to the Stars’ 176. The Avalanche had 109.

Foligno and Brock Faber both said they could tell the Wild’s physicality was wearing on the Stars and that they didn’t want to go back anymore to retrieve pucks.

“You’ve gotta have emotion but not be emotional,” Foligno said, repeating a line coach John Hynes used to reporters numerous times in the previous series. “That’s what we talked about. I’m proud of the way we played physically and didn’t get into things like extra-curricular stuff that could hurt us, like I’ve done in the past. Yeah, I’m 34 now with three kids. I’ve gotta get a little smarter out there.”

He continued, sarcastically, “Gotta get mature someday.”

Foligno took two minor penalties against Dallas, a wee bit different than the 35 penalty minutes he amassed in six games against the Stars in 2023.

Just look at Hartman, who has a history of losing his marbles on the ice. In Game 5, he took cross-checks to the kidneys and head from Benn, who was fined $2,604. But he didn’t retaliate in that game or Game 6.

“It’s a big emphasis with our team,” Hynes said. “I think Marcus and Ryan have learned from their experiences and they’ve grown in different ways. And I think they understand what they need to do and how they need to go about their business. I think they’ve done a good job of that. That’s part of sometimes going through experiences and sometimes you learn. You learn a little bit through adversity or not winning a series, and you dissect the information of why that happened, and the next time you’re in those situations, you want to be able to apply the lessons that you learned.”

Hynes didn’t talk to either player specifically about getting preoccupied with retaliation going into the Dallas series — and won’t heading into the Colorado series, either — but he has implored his team to stick up for each other and play physical but be disciplined doing it. It’s why the Wild have been one of the NHL’s most disciplined teams in Hynes’ two full seasons coaching Minnesota.

“Sometimes being hard to play against is knowing that you might have to take a little bit and not retaliate,” Hynes said. “What happens if you retaliate and then you get called, and then you’re down? It’s part of it. It’s part of, I think, our toughness, our mentality. Part of the players’ commitment is understanding that it’s hard to win, and, yes, it’s hard to be physical, it’s hard to play with discipline. Sometimes you’re going to have to take a little bit to make sure you’re putting the team in the best position to win.”

Look no further than Michael McCarron, one of the league’s toughest fighters. He finished the first round with two huge goals and a whopping … zero penalty minutes.

No fights, no penalties, no extracurriculars, yet he was one of the Wild’s most physical players and didn’t shy from scrums if he felt Stars players were taking advantage of his teammates.

“It took a long time in my career to figure that one out,” he said last month. “I used to take a lot of minors for being maybe a little bit too much of a prick. It’s an art, I guess. It took me 12, 13 years to learn it. You don’t want to be taking too many minors. It’s OK if a guy comes with you (for coincidental minors), but I don’t know what the edge is. You just kind of feel it out, feel what the refs are feeling during a game. If a ref’s on you and he’s looking at everything you do, maybe that time is not the right time to do something.”

In the playoffs, emotions are high. The intensity level of the games is through the roof. The building is louder. Everything is intensified. And nobody wants to see stars like Boldy hit in the head or slew-footed by Benn.

But as Foligno says, Boldy is a man amongst men, can take care of himself and has the innate ability to brush everything off and continue going to the hard areas.

If the Wild want to beat the Avs, staying out of the box will continue to be a necessity. But so will playing just as physically as they did against Dallas.

“Everything is noticed,” McCarron said. “Everything is watched tightly. You want to be smart. There are some times where there’s scrums in front of the net where you can get a guy, but other than that, yeah, just play physical, play hard and be really hard to play against — be a prick. And that’s pretty much what I try to.”