Grim flashback

 Remember the names, first of all. Remember the hopes, the dreams, the wobbly first strides. Remember the first Salchows or axels or sit-spins, and how every turn of the blade looked like a future that was just beginning to show itself.

Remember their names.

Their names were Jinna (Han) and Spencer (Lane) and Olivia (Ter) and Alexandr (Kirsanov).

Their names were Jin (Han) and Christine (Lane) -- Jinna's and Spencer's mothers - and Evgeni (Shishkova) and Vadim (Naumov.)

They were teenagers and their parents and their coaches. They were young figure skaters with their lives spread out before them, and those were guiding those lives -- including a couple who had been where the kids wanted to go, and came back to show them the way 

 That was Shishkova and Naumov, coaches now, competitors then. Three decades ago, when their world was young, too, they won the pairs world championship and skated in two Winter Olympics.

It was a life on ice, and it ended abruptly in the icy Potomac. A life on ice, gone between one eyeblink and the next on a clear January night that promised no such fate.

Shishkova and Vadim and 62 others were aboard American Airlines flight 5342 Wednesday night when it collided with an Army helicopter and went down just shy of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C. They were on final approach when it happened. They were enroute from Wichita, Kan., where Han and Lane had just competed in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, and with the other young skaters had been participating at a U.S. Figure Skating developmental camp.

There were no survivors. 

The death toll was 67, including the three soldiers aboard the helicopter.

It was the first commercial air collision in the United States in 16 years.

Fourteen of the 67 victims were members of the figure skating community; six of those (the Hans and Lanes and Shishkova and Naumov) were affiliated with the Skating Club of Boston.

"Skating is a very close and tight-knit community," SCB executive director Doug Zeghibe said. "These kids and their parents, they're here at our facility in Norwood, six, sometimes even days a week. It's a close, tight bond.

"This will have long-reaching impacts for our skating community."

Long-reaching impacts.

And here of course I'm thinking of another plane crash on approach, in the wooded hills around Huntington, W.Va., 55 years ago come November. I'm reaching even further back than that, to yet another plane crash on approach in Brussels, just 17 days shy of exactly 64 years ago.

The first crash killed the entire Marshall University football team. The second, which happened on Feb. 15, 1961, killed the entire U.S. figure skating team, which was headed to Prague for the world championships.

Hollywood told Marshall's story in "We Are Marshall," which starred Matthew McConaughey and chronicled how the tragedy nearly tore a community and its university apart, and which left an empty space both remember to this day. The plane crash in Brussels left just as empty a space -- an entire national team, gone in an instant -- and reverberates now, six-and-a-half decades later, with every body pulled from the Potomac.

People say the flashbacks that ricochet down the years most vividly usually aren't the ones about sunny days and blue skies. The vivid ones are the ones that wake us at night with a scream  in our throats. Trauma sticks with us more than triumph, surprise, surprise. That's life -- which sucks and then you die, and all that.

Those flashbacks are just beginning of those left behind by what happened this week. There will be hard days ahead, and harder nights. And it probably goes without saying (though I will) that our oafish Felon in Chief made it no easier with his oafish blame game yesterday, during which he gibberish-ed about Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and DEI and dwarfism in the control towers and I don't know what all.

Just what those left behind wanted to hear, no doubt, while their loved ones were still being pulled from the water. But then it's always been about the Felon for the Felon, and how he thinks we care how many baldly phony points he can rack up on his dartboard of endless grievance.

Know what, though?

To hell with him. I'll just do what we should all do where the Felon is concerned, which is ignore him. I'll focus instead on the tragedy of all this, and how often it seems to reach out of the past to again become the present. 

How its echoes never really die, but only wait for their moment to sound again.