Rigidity of extremal quasiregularly elliptic manifolds

We show that for a closed $n$-manifold $N$ admitting a quasiregular mapping from the Euclidean $n$-space the following are equivalent: (1) order of growth of $\pi_1(N)$ is $n$, (2) $N$ is aspherical, and (3) $\pi_1(N)$ is virtually $\mathbb{Z}^n$ and torsion free.