Disappointment comes in many shapes and sizes.

Sometimes you don't get what you want for Christmas or your birthday. Sometimes you don't get the job you really want. Sometimes the girl you really like doesn't like you (and actually likes your best friend a lot). Sometimes you don't get the raise you deserve. Sometimes your favorite band comes out with their worst album (but you buy it anyway). And sometimes your car breaks down in the middle of San Mateo during lunch hour.

Sure there are fixes to these minor catastrophes, but they don't feel as good as having everything work out the way you want. Rarely do you get a chance to protest these bad times. Most of us have to deal with the good and bad with equal aplomb, eventually coming down from the high or climbing up out of the low.

Most of us are not on the national Olympic team. Most of us only vicariously experience the extreme highs and lows of athletic competition after junior high and high school. We root for our university basketball team, even when the best player quits. We try not to get too downhearted when our favorite baseball team is out of the playoff race after the first week of April.

Most sports have definite guidelines on scoring, disqualification and the like. Figure skating, however, is a subjective sport and scores are averaged from the scores of a panel of judges. At the Olympics, these judges come from all different countries. In this way, obscenely high scores and disproportionately low ones are canceled out. But since the scores are based on what a judge sees during a performance, and their personal view of the rules, it is hard to have a set list of guidelines. And maybe it's a little bit easier to cheat.

My Grandma expressed her concern about Michelle Kwan during a phone call a week or so ago. I would say that most of my figure skating viewing probably came during visits to Grandma's house as a kid (Grandpa was around as well, but it was Grandma who really liked watching the proceedings). In 1980, I bused from Kansas City to Manhattan, Kan., for a week of Olympic viewing. Some nights I even stayed up till midnight to watch the winter events, so Grandma's views about figure skating are as close to official as far as I'm concerned. She thought that judges would be biased against Kwan because she is so old (Kwan is 21, the old maid).

It turns out that Kwan's downfall was actually herself and not biased judges. She had a few technical slips in her free skate performance which dropped her from first to third. Sarah Hughes (16), who had been whispered as a favorite underneath the thundering praise for Kwan, jumped from fourth place to first with a flawless performance. She beat out the top Russian skater, Irina Slutskaya (great name), on a tie-breaker. Hughes and Slutskaya had the same score after the short program and free skate, but since Hughes' free skate score was higher, she took the Gold.

Russia is mad. They had to share a gold medal with Canadians (or, as some call it, America Jr.). Some of their skiers were disqualified because their blood looked weird (it turns out the Russian skiers are somehow involved with those alien clone things on the X-Files). And, to add to this indignity, the U.S. hockey team beat the Russian team in the semi-finals.

Losing another gold to the freakin' Americans (after letting the U.S. government break up the decades-old anti-missile treaty and fight the Jihad against terrorism) was too much. I can understand. The U.S. team has won more medals in this Winter Olympics than they've ever won. Russia, which used to be part of the much more formidable Soviet Union (larger athlete pool), is fading from the spotlight. No longer a superpower, they've been demoted to lesser cold weather nation.

But really, who is going to care after the closing ceremonies? When people are asked about the figure skating competition, they'll remember that Kwan got the bronze. Just like in 1998, when some other U.S. skater won the gold and Kwan took home the silver.

Disappointment sucks. But if we all had the opportunity to get a gold medal, a gold medal wouldn't mean quite so much. The athletes and the nations need to chill and let everything happen as it does. Being second in the entire world is pretty good. It's not the best, but it's pretty close.

I remember when I was a senior in high school, our football team (Clovis) was playing Roswell High for the state championship. Near the end of the game, one of our running backs broke free and should have scored a touchdown. Unfortunately, he realized he was going to score and slowed up just enough for a Roswell defender to catch him around the 10 yard line. We couldn't punch in for the score, and Roswell won.

It's funny that I remember that moment of failure better than actually performing in the state marching tournament that same year--a performance that made the Clovis band State Champions for the second year in a row.

Matt Worley is going to bribe an International Olympic Committe member to get his rightly-deserved Gold in No Real News Blathering.