As the marquee event of the Games approached, things were getting a tad ugly. Earlier on Thursday, Russian officials threatened to pull their team out of the rest of the Olympics, saying they had been “humiliated” and felt “greatly unappreciated” and accusing Olympic officials of engaging in a “witch hunt” against Russian athletes. The precipitating incident was the disqualification of the legendary cross-country skier Larissa Lazutina from a race for failing a blood test, but that was just the straw that broke the Russian bear’s back: The Russians are also bitter about the second gold medal awarded to the Canadian pairs skaters, claim the officiating in their hockey game against the Czechs was fixed, and have accused International Olympic Committee officials of drawing too much blood from an athlete — the latter a novel accusation that might have more credibility if it was directed against a Transylvanian.

But the most hurtful charge was made on Russian TV. According to a Chinese news service, an official — after calling these “the dirtiest Games in history” — said, “The organizers and IOC officials are acting in the favor of North American show business against the basic principles of the Olympic movement.” It’s kind of an insane charge, but when you think about it, too many hours in a hotel room watching our rah-rah-USA TV coverage, combined with the various judging controversies, could drive a delicate soul into full-blown Protocols of the Elders of NBC paranoia.

Hughes may have helped avert a second Cold War, and pulled off one of the great upsets in Olympic history, but she said she was just trying to have fun out there. Those of us who have been around the block a few more times than she might be inclined to smile and think, “Kid, you don’t know what not having fun means.” But that’s probably selling her knowledge of herself, and what she needed to do to compete, short. The great thing about figure skating is that it’s wrapped up in all this feminine foo-fooey stuff, and its athletes often look like little girls, and sometimes they are little girls — but that’s totally deceptive. Hughes looks like an archetypal $5-an-hour high school baby sitter — sweet, giggly, spunky — but in four minutes Thursday, she showed she has the poise of Joe Montana.

Hughes performed the routine of her life, nailing every jump from the easiest to the hardest, skating with energy and flow and just generally letting it rip. “I’ve never done that before!” you could hear her saying incredulously as she left the ice. But she had started the evening in fourth place, and if any of the three skaters ahead of her skated well, they would presumably beat her. And in anticipation of the climactic drama of that three-way competition, it was easy to push her stunning performance temporarily to the side.

But the climax never arrived.

First came the teen phenom who went into the long program in third place, the staggeringly gifted 17-year-old Sasha Cohen. Cohen can do things no other skater can do — like a spin in which she rises up out of a crouch, revolving faster and faster while holding her leg almost vertically against her head. (I don’t mean to complain, but it does seem unfair that some people’s entire body is made out of knee cartilage, while others of us have so little.) But Cohen, performing for the first time on the world stage, fell on her toughest jump, the triple lutz-triple toe, and despite some stellar moves — she has future champion written all over her absurdly perfect little doll-like face — was out of the running for gold.

That brought up the sentimental favorite and longtime queen of American figure skating, Michelle Kwan, who started the evening leading by a small margin over the Russian champion, the unfortunately named Irina Slutskaya.

NBC and the rest of the media had been playing up every catchy story they could get their hands on about Kwan — the fact that teeny-tiny Tara Lipinski beat her for silver in Nagano, the mysterious firing of her longtime coach, Frank Carroll — and generally pounding the portentous can she do it, four minutes to redeem four years drum. (What TV does when it gets its large, moist hands on what it thinks is a Hot Story is not an exercise in subtlety.) The stories had become so overblown they almost started to backfire, like World Trade Center perma-patriotism. But in the end the drama was real: a great champion trying to win the ultimate prize, one snatched from her four years ago by a girl barely as big as one of those wooden “You Must be as Tall as Me to Ride the Ferris Wheel” clowns at an amusement park.

The crowd gave her a huge welcome, but as she later said, it just wasn’t her night. Kwan skated gracefully, as always — although the smiling-swan swept-back-arm move is getting old — but disaster struck early: She couldn’t complete the rotation and fell heavily on a triple jump. She gamely battled back — you could hear her telling her father afterwards, “I didn’t give up” — but she lacked the athleticism to make up for that huge mistake.

That left the door wide open for the Russian champion, Slutskaya, the most powerful and athletic of all of the skaters, who also has a hydraulic grace all her own. (The double-spinning jumps she did in her warm-up room were more impressive to my ice-averse eye than her skating moves.) The way Slutskaya moved before her routine, muscling her way across the ice with a heavy, menacing, vaguely walking motion, contrasted sharply with Kwans’s gliding style: It was a gunfighter against a ballerina. But Slutskaya, too, underwhelmed. She skated better than Kwan, but didn’t do her trademark triple-triples and landed very awkwardly on a late jump. She never got into a commanding, one killer jump after the next rhythm that would have put the thing away.

What should the judges do? It would have left a sour taste in everyone’s mouth — or at least anyone who wanted a gold that really glittered — to give the top spot on the podium to Kwan, or even to the worthier Slutskaya. They simply didn’t deserve it. I suppose in the long history of the Games there must have been skating finals in which the winner skated poorly but won because everyone else skated even worse, but the sport has too much of an artistic component in it for such an outcome to be satisfying. In that now-famous 1,000-meter short track race last week, an Australian won the gold simply because everyone in front of him fell down in a heap. That’s OK in that Wild West event, and no one should begrudge Steven Bradbury his happy destiny, a lifetime of free Victoria’s Bitter in Sydney pubs. But figure skating is different. These ladies are supposed to be queens of elegance and athleticism, not staggering vultures chowing down on the carcasses of their rivals.

Moreover, the rage of the Russians, with its unpleasant Cold War associations, and the increasingly nasty Ohno-Kim controversy, which has led to widespread anger in South Korea and accusations of home-field favoritism, would inevitably have been exacerbated by a decision giving the gold to Kwan over Slutskaya. If Kwan won, there would always have been suspicion that her victory was tainted, a kind of Career Achievement Oscar. A Slutskaya victory would have been less politically radioactive, but just as deflating.

But that didn’t happen. Slutskaya’s marks were announced, and they were higher than Kwan’s — the only way that Hughes could win the gold. It came down to a Finnish judge who gave Hughes higher artistic marks than Slutskaya. The Russian skater was angry at the result, but later composed herself. Hughes was sitting with her coach when she realized she had won: She fell onto the floor, squealing and shrieking in amazement. The girl who as a 5-year-old had said in a home movie, “I want to go to the Olympics and win a gold medal. I can’t wait for that to happen” didn’t have to wait anymore.

It’s nice to think that Hughes has a whole lifetime ahead of her to enjoy what she’s done. It’s a thought that should age like a fine wine — and that bottle never goes dry.

As for Michelle Kwan, who comported herself on the medal stand and in a post-skate interview with her usual dignity, watching her face brought to mind something we don’t often think about: how to make friends with failure.

Kwan will doubtless hurt for a while. But one hopes that before long, the Olympics, which for so many years had been the target at which her life has been aimed, will simply flip themselves over and reveal themselves to be merely a bauble, a game for children — but one that inspired years of dedication and striving, qualities that endure. One hopes that her failure to win the highest award, on this one day of thousands in her life, will acquire no metaphorical significance, will not become a mythical totem.

It would be unrealistic to hope that Kwan, and all the athletes who have not won any medals at these Games, regret nothing. But one is permitted to hope that the regrets will fade. And that the colors they dreamed would hang around their neck, gold and silver and bronze, will shine through their lives.

“Most 16-year-olds medal at their first Olympics,” she joked. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to keep up that U.S. trend. But, hopefully, I’ll be able to make up for it when I get to come back I hope for the next Olympics.”

Flatt was fifth and Nagasu was sixth coming into the finale. The top three skaters needed to make major mistakes for either one to make off with a medal. Nagasu finished more than 12 points out of a bronze.

The 17-year-old Flatt lost points on both her triple flips when she didn’t complete the rotation. She said “they felt just fine to me” and acknowledged she was a bit surprised by her score.

Asked if that made her Olympic experience somewhat less fun, Flatt said, “A little bit.”

“I wish that I could’ve gotten a better score, but you make do and just continue to improve,” she said, then added with a laugh, “Got to make sure I fix those flips.”

Any benefits from competing in Vancouver might be seen as early as next month, when the world championships are held in Turin, Italy. No U.S. woman has been on the world championship podium since 2006. American women have won seven Olympic gold medals overall, including three of the last five coming into Vancouver. The only other time since 1952 that they didn’t medal was 1964, which was three years after the entire U.S. team was killed in a plane crash.

Nagasu noted that this year’s gold and silver medalists are both 19 — only a bit younger than she will be at the 2014 Sochi Games. Kim Yu-na and Mao Asada each came into the Olympics with significant international seasoning.

“At 16 you don’t have the experience and the maturity that they skate with,” Nagasu said. “Hopefully, by that time I’ll be able to get that.”

Of course, Mancuso has been drawing criticism thanks to her comments over the weekend about the “popularity contest” between Vonn and other skiers. She seemed to lament, in an interview for Sports Illustrated, that Lindsey Vonn had a big influence over the team. “People are having a hard time reaching their potential because it’s such a struggle for attention. You come to meetings after races, and it’s like it’s a bad day if Lindsey didn’t do well.”

Suddenly it’s crystal clear why Mancuso might be losing that popularity contest. Right before Mancuso’s second run, the NBC announcer says of Mancuso and Vonn: “These are two characters with polar opposite personalities. They approach their personal lives and their ski careers differently, they’ve got different goals, and you know what? That’s just the realities of life on the national team.” Everyone has said this so many times, and yet: What are the differences, exactly? This is just like those vague allusions to the “personal struggles” of Speedy Peterson. Does Mancuso drink and Vonn crochets? Mancuso sluts around in her rhinestone tiaras and Vonn is married? Give us something concrete, here!

Unfortunately, in the actual ski contest, Mancuso can’t make up for her bad finish the day before, and she finishes 8th after her second run. Germany’s Viktoria Rebensberg takes the gold, Slovenia’s Tina Maze takes silver, and Austria’s Elisabeth Goergl gets the bronze.

At the bottom of the hill, NBC’s announcer asks Mancuso about her comments. “I really think it’s been taken a little out of proportion,” Mancuso said (or, you know, taken out of context and then blown out of proportion). “Of course she deserves the attention, she really is the greatest American female skier we’ve had.” Nice double-remorse full reversal, Julia. Is that an event you’ve trained for, or are you just improvising?

At any rate, Mancuso has two silvers and Vonn has a gold and a bronze, so neither can be that unhappy.

Time for freestyle skiing, men’s aerials, see also, crazy twisty flipping by insane people. As you’ll recall from Monday night’s coverage, the big story here in terms of Americans is Jeret “Speedy” Peterson. Everyone is hoping he’ll do his huge Hurricane jump, as promised, a jump that he hasn’t landed in competition since 2007.

In fact, Peterson was in bronze medal position in Torino in 2006 and he decided to go for the Hurricane. He didn’t stick the landing and he lost his medal. This time he needs a really big jump to get a medal. He goes for the Hurricane … and nails it! He takes the lead! “He absolutely tagged it, one of the best ones I’ve ever seen him do!” says Johnny Moseley. The crowd goes wild!

Then Belarus’ Aleksei Grishin does a full-full-double-full, let’s call it the Mangler. He nails the landing and takes first! The final competitor is Canadian Kyle Nissin. He pulls his knees in and the landing isn’t totally controlled. He gets a very low score.

That means Speedy gets the silver! Hurray for Speedy!

 Next is the men’s nordic combined. The large hill jump already took place, now the competitors take part in a 10k cross-country race. Austrian Bernhard Gruber starts 34 seconds ahead, but Americans Bill Demong and Johnny Spillane catch up with him and leave the pack behind. It’s a nail-biter of a three-way race until the very end, when Demong pulls ahead, Spillane takes a close second, and Gruber struggles and falls behind. Gold and silver for the Americans! Right after crossing the finish line, Demong shrugs and jokes, “That was pretty good.” Undercutting your gold, for a quick laugh! A nation of undercutters heartily approves.

Finally it’s time for the women’s figure skating. Everyone’s talking about South Korean Kim Yu-Na after her fine performance in Tuesday night’s short program. But before we can see her shine, it’s time for American Rachel Flatt to take to the ice.

Flatt’s mother is a molecular biologist and her dad’s a geochemical engineer, and Flatt just got accepted to Stanford. Unfortunately, her skating kind of reminds me of Evgeni Plushenko’s: solid jumps, with no flair or grace, and her spins are downright ungainly. She does the job, but she doesn’t make it look very fun. Nonetheless, Scott Hamilton declares this “her best performance of the year.”

Before we go any further, a word about skin-colored skates: Blech. Yes, maybe they make your legs look longer, but they’re ugly, made uglier by those suntan-colored nude hose that run straight into them. They make skaters’ legs and feet look like two orange, misshapen fingers.

Japan’s Miki Ando comes out in a Cleopatra outfit skating to what sounds like the theme song to HBO’s  “Rome.” She nails all her jumps but her program isn’t all that moving, somehow. There’s no emotional center to it. “It just felt really conservative to me, but … without a lot of impact,” says Hamilton.

Speaking of conservative, tonight’s women’s figure skating outfits are pretty unremarkable. In fact, the whole night is just a little bit tame after the disco-barkers and enraged circus performers and Liberace-jumpsuit-wearing aliens we’ve seen at these games so far. In fact, the women’s free skate seems to feature lots of nice, conservative skating outfits, nice, conservative routines, and nice, conservative music. Give me something to work with, people!

Just as we’re starting to feel extra sleepy, here comes the night’s favorite, Kim Yu-Na. She is “the most popular celebrity in South Korea,” according to Tom Hammond, but he says that she wrote a book of short essays about the pressure she carries. In one essay, she wrote, “If my performance falters, not only people around me, but the whole nation might turn their back on me.” At least you don’t have to struggle for that attention, Yu-Na! You don’t know how hard it is to sport a little rhinestone tiara everywhere you go.

 Actually Yu-Na looks extremely relaxed for someone whose nation might ditch her at any second. She skates very fast and her jumps are higher than anyone else’s. She also has more musicality and grace than anyone else. By the end of her performance, I’m sniffling. “This is one of the greatest Olympic performances I’ve ever seen!” gushes Sandra Bezic.

“The coronation is complete, long live the queen!” says Hammond. Yu-Na gets a record-high score of 228.56, which destroys the old record, 210, also set by her.

“And the only woman who has a chance — had a chance — is on the ice now,” says Hamilton.

You really do have to feel for Japan’s Mao Asada, being forced to step out onto the ice while the crowd roars over Yu-Na. Mao is sporting a red and black outfit and she soon becomes the first woman in skating history to do three triple axels in a competition. But she also makes a few mistakes and her performance doesn’t come close to Yu-Na’s.

In truth, the night just isn’t very suspenseful, compared to the way women’s figure skating shook down at the last few Olympics.

But then, suspense is replaced by overwhelming emotion when Canada’s Joannie Rochette appears. She skated the short program two days after her mother’s unexpected death of a heart attack. She stumbles a little on a jump, but she’s a beautiful skater. After her program ends, she’s teary and none of the announcers can speak. Hamilton is very quiet, then his voice breaks, and it’s pretty clear that he’s weeping openly. I’m crying along with him, surrounded by tissues. Please let this poor girl take home a medal!

Finally we have American Mirai Nagasu, looking very young and very nervous. She nails every single jump, and her skating is pretty lovely. “She is a delight, and she just made herself her own Olympic moment,” says Bezic.

Nagasu’s scores lift her to fourth. That means Yu-Na wins the gold, Asada gets silver, and Rochette wins bronze! After seeing American women medal here so many times, it’s almost strange not to have an American on the podium. But these are the rightful winners tonight, and now we can sleep easy knowing that a whole nation will celebrate their queen instead of rejecting her forever!

Winter Olympic sports can be divided into three categories: those that go down, those that go up and those that are level. Last night’s spread included all three. While Alpine Skiing and Skeleton fall into the first category, Ski Jumping falls into the second and Figure Skating into the third.

Ski Jumping, a sport in which young boys in shiny green foam outfits slide down a large snow-covered ramp to launch themselves into the air, has been an Olympic sport since the first Winter Games in Chamonix-Mont Blanc in 1924. Ski jumpers are the gelflings of winter athletes, slight wispy doe-eyed boys (and for now, only boys) who, as has been much noted, starve themselves to fly higher. But it’s easy to understand why Ski Jumping hasn’t attracted much of an audience stateside. It’s straightforward to the point of dull and minimal to the point of static. [Poles, on the other hand, are reportedly mad for it.] There are basically only three positions — crouching, flying and landing and this series is repeated by every competitor with little variation. From the angle of NBC’s camera, the skier himself, as he floats through the air like an aerodynamic Canadian Goose, might as well be back at 30 Rock, wearing a silly suit and standing in front of a green screen in some Gumby-inspired SNL send up. But to focus one’s gaze on the barely moving part is to miss the point. There’s some sort of zen haiku calm to the sport that’s bores the mind but awakens the soul.

Once airborne, the skiers lean acutely into the wind beyond, like matadors of the air. They hold steady and still, the white ground reflected orangely in their ski goggles whirrs below them. For those of who appreciate the simple things in life–warm chocolate cookies, tax refunds, Fred Sandback’s string sculptures–the pure geometric simplicity of the sport is refreshing: two parallel planes, separated by a parabola, like a high school physics diagram made real. For those more metaphorically inclined, the striving ascension is a reminder of man’s hankering for transcendence of this realm of shadows and gravity. It’s Icarus on Ice.

But of course tonight’s event was just a qualifying round. The athletes weren’t competing to win but simply to move on to the next level. Accordingly, my eye was keyed toward failure, hoping secretly for a Vinko Bogatag Agony of Defeat moment. Sadly/happily it never came. Instead these boys glided down the ramp gracefully, floated between 119 and 142 meters, and landed as lightly as a dandelion seed.

If Ski Jumping embodies man’s transcendence, Alpine Skiing glorifies his descent. Here burly big-chinned men built like Clydesdales carom wildly down a mountain. The Super G is 2,076 meters of barely controlled chaos punctuated by great moments of difficulty. It, along with the luge, is the most unforgiving sport, one in which one error compounds into the next, where one miscalculation scotches the entire balance sheet. Anything that’s goes fast, has curves and loves going down is dangerous. [You can't see me, of course, but I'm winking really hard at the screen.] Compared to the quietude of the ski jump, it’s great fun to watch. Among the most spectacular on the slopes were of course Bode Miller who hewed closely to the flags, so closely in fact he wore arm pads. But Miller faced overwhelming competition both in terms of his ski time and redemption narrative from the Norwegian Aksel Lund Svindal who skied the course in 1:30:34 to win gold. Both are, to some extent, comeback kids. But whereas Bode Miller’s 2006 fall from grace was self-inflicted, involving an endless series of Italian nightclubs and subpar runs in the Torino games, Aksel’s fall was much more literal. In 2007, the highly rated Norwegian crashed hard in Beaver Creek, soaring unhappily through the air and breaking his face and groin upon landing. But, as we were told last night through a touching NBC montage, Aksel managed to come back to score a win at the very same course that nearly destroyed him less than a year later.

Does it perhaps say something about the indomitable American spirit that we prefer our heroes’ falls self-inflicted? Indeed, “Where were you when you learned Tiger Woods was a sex fiend?” is this generation’s version of “Where were you when JFK died?” We prefer our heroes on the way down than on the way up and besides, peripeteia is just so fun to watch on TMZ. This leads us somewhat unexpectedly to Figure Skating.

NBC might be losing $12 million on the Olympics but they aren’t going down without a fight. Throughout the games, Bob Costas, with his puppy dog eyes glinting mischievously, has tried to stir the pure Olympic cauldron, hoping some of the lesser qualities of mankind might rise to the top. He probably has a Post-It next to his mirror in his dressing room reading, “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” Last night Costas’ hankering for dirt was most evident in his stoking the flames between Evan Lysacek, the American cyborg who won Men’s Figure Skating Gold, and the Russian Evgeni Plushenko, who didn’t. Fireside, Costas endlessly needled Lysacek about the Russian’s mildly disparaging comments but Lysacek, though sleep deprived, remained gracious and even keeled. Costas O; Decency 1. But it was really in the Compulsory Ice Dance section of the night that NBC let its muckracking Automatic Grammatizator get going.

The Compulsory Ice Dance sounds like some sort of medieval torture and that’s not so far from the truth. If the Ski Jump is the haiku of the games, the compulsory ice dance is a villanelle, a sport corseted so tightly with rules and regulations that the gasps of creativity are remanded to grow through the cracks. Last night couples had to dance to something called the Tango Romantica, executing precise steps on certain beats in predetermined locations while describing proscribed patters on the ice. That does sound romantic! To comprehend the complexity take a look at this scoring sheet.

Bob Dylan might have said it best when, in his 1965 ballad of Figure Skating, he described the experience thus, “Old lady judges watch people in pair/ Limited in sex, they dare/ To push fake morals, insult and stare/ While money doesn’t talk, it swears/Obscenity, who really cares/Propaganda, all is phony.” Essentially inscrutable to the civilian, Ice Dancing seems like a bunch of men dressed as waiters dancing with women dressed as estate brooches to the same song. Compared to this my W9 forms seem compelling.

Enter Costas and Co. who spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on the drama between the two teams of Americans: Meryl Davis and Charlie White, and Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto. In NBC’s hands, the rivalry–if there was one to begin with–escalates into an epic cold war. The younger Davis and White come to embody all that is light and white and right with the world. They’re young and dewy eyed. Charlie likes Jack Johnson and Kanye; Meryl’s favorite colors are blue and pink. They’ve been skating together since they were ten. Tanith and Benjamin are the Odile to Davis and White’s Odette. The duo are darker, more mysterious, dramatic, older and a little condescending. After minutes of off-screen NBC waterboarding, Agosto manages to say something a wee bit not very nice about Davis and White, something like, “We have more experience.” Davis and White manage to pooh pooh the rivalry itself which sounds suspiciously like they pooh pooh Belbin and Agosto. It’s not much but it’ll have to do and so the ice, once horizontal, starts to tilt and we merrily slide down it, picking up speed as we go.