MORRISVILLE, N.C. — Jesperi Kotaniemi was lying on his back with his eyes closed in the training room, trying to hold still as a team doctor put the top of his right eyelid back together. He could only tell what was going on out on the ice by the noise of the crowd.

Then he heard the roar, and he knew, and it was just a question whether he could get stitched up in time to celebrate with his Carolina Hurricanes teammates before they left the ice. He missed the handshake line, but not the party.

How many stitches? Kotkaniemi didn’t and doesn’t care.

“The doctor went pretty fast,” Kotkaniemi said. “I wanted to get out there as fast as I could so I don’t even really know.”

It looks like it took about 10. Unlike Jeff O’Neill in Toronto in 2002, he did not return in time to score the series-winner — The Eye of the Storm, famously — but he earned the four-minute power play that ended up winning the game the hard way.

Two days later, Kotkaniemi’s right eye was red, but totally functional, even if the socket around it was a grotesque purple mess.

“It’s a little puffed up right now, but we’ll be fine,” Kotkaniemi said.

You don’t say.

“He dodged a bullet, I guess,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “Because the stick got up there pretty good. It doesn’t look great, but it’s OK.”

From the ugly moment when it happened, everything else was a best-case scenario. The Hurricanes had settled affairs with the New Jersey Devils, and Kotkaniemi was cut and bruised but had otherwise escaped one of hockey’s most feared injuries.

There are a few that stand out above all others. The head-first hit into the boards that has left players paralyzed. The feet-first slide into the boards that all but ended Joni Pitkanen’s career (and changed the way icing is called). The skate cut that maims or even kills. It’s a dangerous game.

But eyes are always under threat, from sticks and pucks and gloves. An eye injury altered the trajectory of Paul Maurice’s career, from would-be defenseman to precocious — and, eventually, Stanley Cup-winning — coach. One-time Hurricanes forward Manny Malhotra played the latter half of his career with limited vision in one eye. The entire tenor of the Hurricanes’ playoff series with the Montreal Canadiens in 2006 changed when Justin Williams accidentally high-sticked Habs captain Saku Koivu in the eye while trying to lift his stick from behind.

Mandatory face shields, grandfathered into the league in 2013, have saved countless eyes. But there’s still a nightmare scenario where the tip of a stick blade gets up and under the visor. That’s what happened to Kotkaniemi on Tuesday, when Devils center Dawson Mercer lifted his stick into Kotkaniemi’s face.

Kotkaniemi grabbed at his face immediately, accepting a quickly proffered towel and going straight to the dressing room. He could still see out of his right eye at that point, so he figured he had avoided the worst, but no one else knew that at the time.

“Not too bad, you know,” Kotkaniemi said. “It just started leaking a little bit. I was able to see all the time so it was not too bad.”

With eyes closed, he heard the roar as the Hurricanes advanced to play the Washington Capitals in the second round. Kotkaniemi, his face puffy and bruised, is a lucky man to be able to join them there.

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