PAVAROTTI, FLYING TOMATO WIN BIG.

Byline: STEVE DILBECK

SESTRIERE, Italy - The limbs will defrost somewhere over the Atlantic, but understand if the mind takes longer to become fully operational again.

Three weeks spent mostly in the Alps and you just want toes and fingertips to have sensation again, but a Winter Olympics has come to an end and these are the memories that will resonate as the flight heads happily home:

-- Pavarotti sings Puccini's ``Nessun Dorma'' at the opening ceremony. This song stuck in our heads the next 17 days. Reporters were humming it in every venue. Thinking his CD sales spiked. Poor guy probably needed a breakthrough career moment.

-- Shaun ``The Flying Tomato'' White nails his halfpipe run to win the first U.S. goal and bring some brief personality to the Games. It was so long ago, it feels like it happened at the Salt Lake City Games.

-- Michelle Kwan checks out. The beloved cover girl might have called it a career without an attempt at a grand finale.

-- Bode Miller goes boom! As in the biggest bust of the Olympics, not that he apparently cares. Note to U.S. Ski Association: Next time send skiers who actually want to win for their country.

-- Joey Cheek does good. Then does it again. He wins the speedskating 500-meter gold and then announces he is giving his $25,000 prize money to Right to Play, a charity that supports youth sports in impoverished African countries.

-- Jeremy Bloom looks good, doesn't do so good. The two-sport star, World Cup champion and part-time model fails to medal in moguls, heads to Indianapolis for the NFL combine and hopeful career as a wide receiver. Teammate Toby Dawson wins the bronze.

-- Hannah Teter wins women's halfpipe, wears a really ugly hat and says everything but, ``Dude, it was so righteous'' at her news conference.

-- Ted Ligety wins a stunning gold in the men's combined. Along with Julia Mancuso's gold in the slalom, Ligety saves U.S. skiing from the biggest sporting embarrassment since, oh, the 2005 Dodgers.

-- A volunteer outside the Sestriere-Borgato complex, while it is snowing and penguins are wandering, asks if I'm cold. She was serious.

-- Johnny Weir misses his bus. Note to the princess: You've got four years to plan it out, get to the venue on time.

-- Jacobellis becomes a verb. Lindsey Jacobellis might have given the U.S. its most defining Olympic moment when she had gold in her pocket and stopped for a hot dog. Then denied it, then admitted it, sort of.

-- The U.S. men's hockey team goes bust, winning only one of six games. ``Oh, well,'' said one scribe, ``the U.S. will always have Kazakhstan.''

-- The U.S. women's hockey team goes bust. Supposedly a lock for the finals, they are upset by Sweden. This is like Uma Thurman losing a man to Rosanne.

-- Lindsey Kildow won't stay down. In one of the best stories of the Games, Kildow is hospitalized after a horrific crash during training but still competes in the downhill.

``It is difficult going from the hospital bed to the starting gate,'' Kildow said. ``But I wasn't worried that I'd forgotten anything.''

-- It snows in the Alps. Very nice at first. A brilliant winter wonderland. Then it snowed some more. Let up, and snowed some more. Bus drivers from Rome slow to 20 miles an hour in the mountains.

-- Sasha Cohen falls down. Leading after a mesmerizing short program, she falls on her first two jumps. An old pattern comes back to haunt. In retrospect, all she had to do to win gold was stay on her feet.

Sasha Cohen gets up. Give her this, she kept at it. She did not quit. She got up from the ice and skated perfectly the rest of the way to win a silver medal that stunned even her.

-- Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick get to fussin' and a fightin'. In an Olympics otherwise devoid of controversy, the two speedskating stars reveal they're less than best friends. It becomes the biggest and best thing to hit speedskating since Eric Heiden.

-- Russian hockey player Alexander Ovechkin goes to the stereotype. After his team upset Canada, Ovechkin said: ``Everybody in my country is jumping and drinking lots of vodka.''

-- Priorities are in order. In the Sestriere media mini-hub 10 televisions are set to different Olympic events, but every night half of them are turned to soccer.

-- American snowboarder Tyler Jewell, describing the struggle to make it to Turin after living in a tent last summer: ``It was great. I didn't watch any TV, just the stars and the sunset. I went to the public libraries and ate my meals at the hospital. It only cost $2.50 and you got meat and potatoes. You can't find a deal like that anywhere else in Steamboat.''

-- Unlike most Olympics, these Games seemed devoid of compelling stories. And really, there are only so many mothers you can interview.

-- The U.S. had its second-best medal count ever and was runner-up to Germany in total medals. In the end it was a highly successful Winter Games for the U.S.

Still, it might best be remembered in America for its failures - Bode, Jacobellis, Cohen, the hockey teams, the U.S. ski team.

-- Italy never was all that excited about hosting the Games and acted like it. Turin is an industrial wasteland without the standard European charm. The mountains were a separate and exhausting Olympics from the city.

-- In the end, Russian biathlete Anna Bogaliy spoke for most of us: ``The only strength I have left, is to go home.''

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 2) Shaun White of the U.S., above, won gold in the halfpipe, and Luciano Pavarotti displayed his pipes at the opening ceremony.

Photos by Getty Images