When it was over, I added up the numbers and found the skaters who were there represented a total of 45 Olympic or World Championship medals. Everyone there was a top level athlete with a record to prove it.

And yet, first among equals, without question, was Michelle Kwan. Her ovation both before and after skating was the loudest. She may still be bothered by the hip injury that kept her out of the Olympics because there were no difficult jumps or moves in her routine. Hers was not close to the best exhibition performance on Saturday. But that didn’t matter. We were seeing, in my view, the finest skater in U.S. history.

This country has produced any number of great skaters, but no one has won nine national titles and only Carol Heiss, among U.S. skaters, has equaled her five world titles.

But her popularity is due to far more than simply winning. She has shown always a dignity and class that made her seem far older than she actually is (she is just 25 now).

You find out far more about athletes when things don’t go well than when they are sitting on top of the world. In her Olympic disappointments Kwan has shown exactly what she is made of.

She has an Olympic silver and bronze, but both were disappointing because she was, at worst, a co-favorite to win both times. She gave sincere congratulations to the winners and moved on.

This year was perhaps her biggest disappointment. Unable to perform at the Nationals because of injury, she was given a pass to the Olympics by the U.S. Figure Skating Association (in my view the right decision; she had certainly earned that consideration).

When she got to Italy, she found her injury would still not allow her to compete at the level it would take to win a medal. She pulled out, days before she had to, to give young Emily Hughes a chance to get acclimated to the Olympics. Then, after being offered thousands of dollars by NBC to be a commentator, she quietly went home, saying that if she stayed she would be a distraction. She was exactly right.

The cheers she heard on Saturday in Charlotte were no big deal to an athlete of her stature. She has heard louder and longer, but I would like to think those cheers were as much for the way she has conducted herself as for the way she has skated.

MOVIE OF THE WEEK

”The Best Years of our Lives” 1946

This movie was nominated for 8 academy awards and won 7, including best picture, best director and best actor for Fredric March, who is little known now, but for more than 30 years was one of the top actors in Hollywood.

It concerns the adjustment that veterans had to make when returning from World War Two. Many had not seen their wives and children for 3-4 years. The world had changed and so had they.

One of the veterans is played by Harold Russell, a real veteran who lost both his hands in the war. He was voted Best Supporting Actor and also given a special Oscar for being an inspiration to disabled veterans. He is the only person ever to win two Oscars for the same role.

It struck a cord with a country trying to adjust to peace. It is both heart wrenching and heart warming and 60 years later remains one of the top films ever made.