Unified Team

MERIBEL, France -- They were this close: tied with 10 minutes left, their goalie hot, their opponent frustrated, their fans filling the little rink with cheers, cowbells and designs on a gold medal no one had envisioned.They were this close: outskated, outplayed and out-everything, just blown away, but still tied with 10 minutes left. As close as one shot from the lead. One opening. One sudden chance. That close. One break."Everyone was saying, 'We're so close, we're right there,' " said Sean Hill, a defenseman on the U.S. Olympic hockey team.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- You can buy a CCCP jacket right off the back of an Olympic athlete. One hundred fifty dollars American.No problem.You can buy an athlete's pin, the one with the old hammer-and-sickle on it. A real collector's item. Fifty dollars.No problem.You can even buy into a fledgling professional hockey league in the former Soviet Union. All offers considered. Price negotiable.Definitely, no problem.This isn't a team, anymore -- it's a going-out-of-business sale.These are the final days of the Soviet sports machine.

MERIBEL, France -- Before they received their gold medals, before the Olympic flag was raised and the Olympic anthem was played, the kids dressed in red and the coach dressed in the gray pinstripe suit would have this moment on the big sheet of ice perched a mile high in the French Alps.The kids tossed this old hard-liner named Viktor Tikhonov into the air, threw him up as if he were a sack of potatoes. Caught him, and tossed him again. Laughed with the old man, too.And the old man's face crinkled up into a smile.

* SHADES OF ROLLERBALL: The graceful, delicate Olympic figure skaters are about to be elbowed off the ice by the gladiators of short-track speed skating.Short track -- fast, furious and thrilling to watch -- has been elevated to full Games status for the first time at Albertville with heats beginning tomorrow.Skaters will race in packs at up to 30 mph around a high speed track measuring little more than 100 yards in the Olympic Ice Hall they share with the more genteel figure skaters.The sport, in marked contrast to figure skating, is also devastatingly easy to understand -- the first across the line wins.

* A WYLIE SORT OF GUY: Last Saturday night, Paul Wylie surprisingly won the Olympic silver medal in men's figure skating. His life has not been the same since.The skating ended about 10:30 p.m. The medals ceremony and a news conference kept him occupied past midnight. Then he, his parents, his girlfriend and his sponsor commandeered a bistro here and celebrated until 3:45 a.m.Television people from CBS took him back to the International Broadcast Center in Moutiers, showed him tapes of his exciting 4 1/2 -minute freestyle program, put him on a late-night television wrap-up (it was 5:15 a.m. in Albertville)

ALBERTVILLE, France -- Once, they were young, fresh-faced kids from Minnesota and New England. They wore red-white-and-blue uniforms and took on teams that were machines, creating miracles once every two decades.But a strange thing happened to the U.S. hockey team on the long road to the 1992 Olympic Winter Games:The plucky kids have vanished and the Broad Street Bullies have hit the French Alps.Tomorrow, the United States will begin Olympic hockey play by taking on Italy in a chalet-style rink that sits a mile high in the chi-chi ski resort of Meribel.

MERIBEL, France -- Ray LeBlanc came off the ice slowly, this man with the Stars and Stripes mask, and the big white lobster claw of a goalie's glove that had given the hockey world fits these past two weeks.There was 17:22 left in the bronze-medal game last night. The team without a name was losing in this building without a name. But LeBlanc still wanted to hold on to a piece of a dream, still wanted to play it out at the Winter Olympics."I'm sad how things worked out," he said. "But it's just a game."

BARCELONA, Spain -- They began when an archer ignited a caldron with a flaming arrow, and they ended last night with closing ceremonies that included fire-breathing dragons, giant illuminated beach balls, dancing horses and fireworks that were so loud that a stadium atop a hill shook.The 1992 Summer Olympics were history's biggest. Games of transition, they were labeled, with 12 republics of the former Soviet Union competing for the last time as one Unified Team, with South Africa returning after 32 years of exile, with Germany united, with China ascendant, with the United States once again powerful.

BARCELONA, Spain -- They began when an archer ignited a caldron with a flaming arrow, and they ended last night with closing ceremonies that included fire-breathing dragons, giant illuminated beach balls, dancing horses and fireworks that were so loud that a stadium atop a hill shook.The 1992 Summer Olympics were history's biggest. Games of transition, they were labeled, with 12 republics of the former Soviet Union competing for the last time as one Unified Team, with South Africa returning after 32 years of exile, with Germany united, with China ascendant, with the United States once again powerful.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- Later, they would tell you how strange it all was, this business about the flag and the anthem.She wanted to see the Soviet hammer and sickle and hear the familiar song that once was the theme music for an empire some called evil. And he couldn't understand why the five-ringed Olympic flag was rising in one corner of the sweltering arena, and the "Olympic Hymn" was echoing through this tuna can of a building."All I could think of, was, I hope to get through doping control very fast," Artur Dmitriev said.