GAMES TO REMEMBER.

Byline: PAUL OBERJUERGE

SALT LAKE CITY - Some memories of Salt Lake 2002 ...

--Sarah Hughes falling to her knees and shrieking in delight when she realized she had won a gold medal in women's skating. Ed McMahon appearing at your door with a check for $1 million doesn't generate that kind of emotion.

--Hughes saying one of her upcoming goals is to score ``more than 1,500'' on the Scholastic Aptitude Test; 1,600 is perfect.

--Seeing Michelle Kwan, bronze medalist, with the swollen eyes of a defeated prize fighter an hour after the skate competition, and someone asking her if she had been sick. Replied Kwan: ``No, I've been crying.''

--Sasha Cohen calling her mother on a cell phone during opening ceremonies, and handing it to President Bush. He said hello.

--The World Trade Center flag at opening ceremonies. I didn't think I would care, but I did.

--Derek Parra crying when he got his gold and saying, ``Yes, I'm emotional. I cried at `Bambi.''

--Bode Miller's channeling of Franz Klammer on his edge-of-disaster downhill run in the combined event. Miller said he either would recover from sliding on his side ``or I would die.'' He did, and he didn't. Instead, he won a silver medal.

--Scrawny little Simon Ammann, the Swiss ski-jumper on being compared to English ski-jump clown Michael ``Eddie the Eagle'' Edwards, circa 1988: ``I think his glasses were about three times as thick as mine, and his jumps about three times less.''

--Wondering how low Jean Racine could go. After dumping ``best friend'' Jen Davidson and stealing Bonny Warner's brakeman, Gea Johnson, on the eve of the Olympic trials, the unscrupulous bobsledder attempted to recruit Jill Bakken's brakeman from her two days before the event because Johnson pulled a hamstring. Vonetta Flowers stuck with Bakken and won gold. Racine was a tearful fifth. Very sad.

--Jim Shea, skeleton gold-medalist, talking about his sport: ``If bobsled is the champagne of thrills, skeleton is the moonshine of thrills.''

--Thinking Eric Heiden, the only man to win five golds in one Winter Olympics, should have lit the Olympic caldron, not 20 hockey players.

--Steven Bradbury, Luckiest Man in the Olympics, winning the 1,000-meter short-track race when all four skaters in front of him fell down. He said it was his plan to hang back and wait for wrecks. ``Those were my tactics, and it worked like a charm,'' said the charming Aussie.

--Alexei Yagudin's virtuosity. Men's skating is seriously underrated; they do everything the women do, except higher and faster.

--Belarus hockey coach Vladimir Kirkunov, on upsetting Sweden: ``Sometimes even a gun with no bullets shoots, and that was us today.''

--Another nonconformist snowboarder, silver-medalist Danny Kass, asked if he would be emotional on the medals podium. ``I'm gonna try to cry,'' he said.

--Hundreds of men in camouflage military uniforms. Not something you're used to in downtown mid-America. At least the automatic rifles disappeared after the first few days.

--Two expressions: The Whiner Games and Fight the Liar Within. The latter a mocking takeoff on the official slogan of ``Light the Fire Within.''

--Remembering, again, that the Winter Olympics are more fun than the Summer, despite the weather. Winter is smaller, more intimate, and the athletes are humble.

-- Wishing good luck to Turin 2006, and thinking it's going to need it, following Salt Lake City's act.

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Photo:

American Bode Miller's spectacular second run that won a silver medal in the men's combined was the highlight for the U.S. in Alpine skiing.

Alessandro Trovati/Associated Press