ST. LOUIS — If the St. Louis Blues’ season had finished the way it was heading in February, the tone of the team’s interviews Tuesday at Enterprise Center could have been much darker.

The Blues were playing at a .491 points percentage and were projected to miss the playoffs for the third straight season.

The majority of the sentiment would have been that it’s time for a rebuild and that significant changes with the core were a must.

Instead, the Blues played at a .788 points percentage after the 4 Nations Face-Off, qualified for the postseason and took the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Winnipeg Jets to Game 7, where they experienced an excruciating end with a 4-3 loss in double overtime.

The run was mighty impressive and undoubtedly changed fans’ perception about the franchise’s future heading into the 2025-26 season.

But how much did it alter the thinking of Doug Armstrong, coach Jim Montgomery, captain Brayden Schenn and others? Have the Blues climbed out of the retool? Should they be seen as a postseason contender? Will they be more aggressive this offseason, making trades and signing free agents, than they’ve been the past two years?

Those are fair questions because, regardless of what changes people can agree need to be made to the roster, the Blues legitimately turned the team’s trajectory with their performance over the past three months.

“What I said to some of the guys was that in five or six years, when people Google or Wikipedia this season, they’re going to see 96 points and a playoff team,” Armstrong said. “An NHL team is like a tanker in the ocean: When you want to turn things around, it takes a while. We had 92 points a year ago, and this year we had 96. If we do that again next year, that gets us close to 100 points, and that’s where we want to go.

“I’m hoping that we have turned the tide on the ‘re-whatever’ and we’re starting to become a competitive team that has reasonable expectations of success. I think the re-whatever is ending and we become who we want to be, and now it’s how quickly do we move up and continue to expand? We could take a step backwards, but I don’t think we’re going to take a step backwards.”

In a combined hour-long conversation with Armstrong and Montgomery, the measure of the Blues becoming 5 percent better next season was mentioned multiple times. If accomplished, they believe that will take the club to a level beyond where it was this season.

“In this league, it’s hard to improve by 5 percent, and that’s what we’re going to need to do again next year,” Montgomery said. “That’s going to be incumbent upon every player, coach and person in the organization to try to get 5 percent better, if not more.

“How do we go about that? Well, the investment by everybody after 4 Nations was significantly improved, and now everybody has to have a great summer so we have a good camp and we’re not chasing a playoff spot but in one. Those are things we have to build upon because we were that for two or three months.”

Knowing how they got here will help the Blues understand how to carry on what they’re doing.

First, it’s realizing how much the process was sped up by the acquisition in August of Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg via offer sheet from the Edmonton Oilers; the hiring of Montgomery in November after he was fired by the Boston Bruins; and the trade in December for defenseman Cam Fowler from the Anaheim Ducks.

“I was talking to Mr. Stillman the other night, and I said, ‘We were fortunate enough to have three large changes into our group within a year,’” Armstrong said. “You can sometimes go five years without having three large changes that affect your team.”

Those acts alone, however, didn’t guarantee success.

Other factors were involved, including an increase in the club’s confidence after the 4 Nations Face-Off.

“Throughout the year, if you look at the ups and downs, we didn’t start off great, and when Monty came in, we felt like we were playing good hockey; we just weren’t able to get wins,” Blues forward Robert Thomas said. “Then you come out of the break with a fresh mind and get back to the way we were playing, and the results started to come.”

“After break, it brought excitement, like how we grow,” Blues forward Pavel Buchnevich said. “We went back to playing as a team, not player by player. Everybody was doing basically the same thing, playing the system. I’m a big believer (that) as soon as you get the confidence, it’s going to be, like, (a) snowball, you keep rolling over. It was a big lesson.”

More confidence led to more wins, and thus the culture improved.

“We’ve all been on teams where there’s a little bit of fakeness or whatever, where guys are putting on their gear and playing for themselves,” Schenn said. “We feel like we did a good job of holding each other accountable, and at the end of the day, we had a bunch of guys that were gamers who are willing to lay it on the line for each other, and guys felt that.”

Armstrong lauded Schenn for assisting with that.

“He’s got his arms around what needs to be done,” Armstrong said. “He is selfless in the way he treats players off the ice. He does a lot of those things behind the scenes that leaders do. I think he’s done a really good job, and more importantly, his teammates think he’s done a good job. If he has the respect of his teammates, and he does, he has the respect of me.”

Schenn stressed that many players took “massive steps, whether it was maturity or leadership,” this season. But the captain knows rosters change year to year, and as former Blues coach Ken Hitchcock used to say, the chemistry and culture in the dressing room need to be re-created every year.

“‘Culture’ is a funny word because there’s so much that goes into it and it’s always changing,” Schenn said. “I feel like the foundation of the St. Louis Blues, everyone knows what it looks like. But it’s a tough thing to build up, and once you have it, it’s even harder to keep. You can’t let things slip. We have taken steps in the right direction, but now we have to continue working on it.”

Montgomery believes the key to that will be the players keeping up their communication during the offseason.

“In order for us to pull more out, it’s going to be a commitment off the ice,” Montgomery said. “It’s players pulling each other more into the fight during the summer.”

Thomas agreed and said the motivation should stem from the way the season ended.

“Every year you come in, you want to win it all, and it feels like a letdown every time you don’t,” he said. “It definitely sucks right now, but looking forward, there’s a lot to be excited about, and everyone can see it and feel it. That’s what gets you to move on: looking forward. You’ve got to bring it into your training and bring it into how you think about the game.”

Meanwhile, Montgomery says he’ll be doing his part, studying the top teams around the NHL and using that research to tweak parts of the Blues’ game plan.

“There’s some areas that need to get better, and we’ll look at those,” he said. “No. 1, I think, just everybody coming back and having a training camp together and setting the tone of ‘This is how hard we’re going to work, and we’re going to come and have fun, too, because we get to play a game for a living.’ That’s something that everybody has embraced — that work is fun for us.”

And though the first-round series didn’t go as the club wanted, it’ll take that experience into training camp, too.

“The playoffs are a growing opportunity for us,” Montgomery said. “We have to learn to hold on to leads better. We have to learn how to handle big moments, where the pressure gets raised, especially on the road. Those are things where everybody got valuable experience, and that’s going to be really important as we move forward as an organization.”

The other benefit of the Blues’ end-of-season success is that Armstrong may have a more aggressive approach when adding talent.

“How we perform on the ice is going to (help) make the management’s decisions, whatever we do, like trades or improve the team,” Buchnevich said. “I feel like if your team is good, people will want to come here. So we have to play better and basically make a message to Doug, like, ‘OK, we’re ready.’”

And the interest might be more mutual.

“You have to show that you’re ready for that, not only to Army and whatnot but the rest of the league,” Thomas said. “Players have to want to come here. Everyone in our room knows what a great culture we have in St. Louis, and I think that’s spreading more and more.”

That wasn’t the only message Armstrong got from the players after losing to the Jets.

“I think organizationally we had a decent year — not a great year, a decent year,” Armstrong said. “What excites me the most is the disappointment they have. They’re not patting themselves on the back on what a great ride we had after the 4 Nations. … They know that we had the best team over 82 games dead-to-rights, and that’s going to sting them as it stings me.”

The tone of Tuesday’s interviews wasn’t as dark as it could have been. But it wasn’t excitement, either.

“There’s lots of positives compared to where we were last year, with what people were saying should be done with this team to what we’re talking about now,” Schenn said. “But your season is over, and you’re never a playoff team until you are again next year, and that’s kind of the mentality you have to have.

“Do we feel like we’re in a better spot now than three months ago? Absolutely. But we have to learn just how hard it is to make the playoffs. It’s a tough league, nothing comes for free, and you can’t look at it like you had a good 25-game run and made the playoffs. This is going to make us feel like we want more.”