Sarah Hughes, America's Skating Sweetheart

There's been too much death and disappointment on this blog lately. So today I want to talk about someone who has brightened this nation's spirits since, oh, about 11 p.m. on Thursday night.

That's right. Sarah Hughes. The third-stringer on the three-woman U.S. figure skating team. The youngest of the US competitors.

The young lady who proved everyone wrong. The girl who proved that anything is possible, if all the cards fall right.

At approximately 11:00 p.m. Thursday I arrived home from band practice to see the top skaters. When I arrived home, Sarah was first to go on, the fourth-place skater, with the top three at the time - Michelle Kwan, Irina Slutskaya, and Sasha Cohen - yet to skate. Resplendent in a new lavender skating dress, Sarah Hughes took the ice. She first landed an easy double axel and then proceeded to land four triples in the first minute and a half of her routine, including a triple-triple. No problems. All the jumps were landed beautifully. Sarah seemed to feed off the crowd's reaction and continued towards a close-to-perfect program. The TV commentators, Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic, couldn't find any fault. Neither could the judges, but you had to figure they were giving Sarah lower marks to make room for the others should their programs, God forbid, be better than Sarah Hughes' masterpiece.

The top three ladies' programs were not up to what Hughes had accomplished, with Kwan and Cohen falling and Slutskaya's only slightly better, and by dint of the way placement is dictated by the rules of judging (yes, they do still exist, in spite of the Sale-Pelletier debacle of the week earlier), a higher placement in one category by one judge (from Finland) gave the thinnest of edges to Sarah Hughes.

And it did not stop there. At the Champions' Exhibition the following evening, Sarah (dressed in a beautiful black sequined pants outfit with elbow-length gloves) wowed the crowd with two routines, the first of which showed the 16-year-old skater showing insouciance and flirtatiousness belying her years as she did another flawless performance to the tune of "Bye Bye Blackbird". The second special performance (with Hughes back in the now-famous dress she won the Gold in) included a recorded introduction by Hughes declaring herself a New Yorker affected greatly by the events of September 11, 2001.

If you didn't absolutely fall for Sarah during these past two nights, you have no heart at all.

The 16-year-old from Long Island has suddenly become the Olympic Sweetheart. And as they like to say on one of the pro skating tours, "Winning is just the beginning". In spite of her having no agent at this time, expect to see Sarah making the rounds of the talk circuit (with her first stop possibly being the New York-based Rosie O'Donnell show, since Rosie is also from L.I.), getting some nice endorsement deals [update: her first is Wheaties, she unveiled the box with her image on it in Salt Lake City on Monday --D.M.], and skating in as many exhibitions as her school schedule will permit. There will be a parade at a future date [now confirmed for Sunday, March 3 starting at 11:00 am --D.M.] through her home town of Great Neck. What is so nice about Sarah is she is still devoted to her friends and family, and manages the time for a social life outside skating.

It could not have happened to a nicer person. And the real kicker is I could have told you all this before the Olympics even began. I said to my wife, "You know that Sarah Hughes is going to win the Gold Medal. Forget about Michelle's destiny. Youth will be served."

Congrats, Sarah... we will be watching you in the future.