A day for the USA

 Raise a glass this a.m. to U-S-A!, U-S-A!, which had itself a day yesterday over in Italy.

There was the women's Olympic hockey team, which beat Canada for the gold medal  but not as easily as it beat Canada a week ago in the group phase. That final was a resounding 5-0 keister-tanning; this time it was like pulling teeth, which is what it's usually like when the Americans and Canadians have at it.

Final score was 2-1, and it took overtime to decide it. Megan Keller scored the winner after Hilary Knight, playing in her last Olympics, saved the day on a deflection with 2:04 to play in regulation to force OT. The Americans, down 1-0 since the second period, had pulled their goalie in a desperate attempt to get even.

So hooray for them, and also, whew. And hooray, also, for America's latest golden girl, the irrepressible Alysa Liu, who came to Milan/Cortina just hoping to skate well but wound up skating the, um, well-est of them all.

Her flawless long program, full of triple axels and toe loops and what-not, overhauled the two Japanese skaters in front of her for the gold medal. She's the first American gold medalist in women's figure skating since Sarah Hughes -- remember her? -- 24 years ago.

And also the least likely.

Liu, you see, dropped out of the sport after the Beijing Games four years ago, citing burnout. She was 16 years old at the time, and for the next couple of years did what teenage girls do who don't know a toe loop from a Froot Loop. A year or so ago she took it up again, and came to these Games with no expectations of a medal. Maybe a bronze, if she was lucky.

It's better left to the psychologists to determine if that open-ended, I'm-just-here-to-express-myself approach is what won her gold. Certainly it would seem to have lifted any pressure she might have felt; when you come at something with no expectations, the expectations can't weigh you down or make you turn a blade wrong. 

"We never actually had a goal of winning," said one Liu's two coaches, Phillip DiGuglielmo, noting that the goal for this season was simply to make the Olympic team. "That was the really big deal for her."

And Liu?

"I don't need this (medal)," she told D'arcy Maine of ESPN. "But what I needed was the stage and I got that, so I was all good."

Which may be why she got the medal, too.