A special feeling in watching Alysa Liu triumph, both live and in the mind's eye

As a journalist, you are trained to cover a story with neutrality and dispassion.

As a human being, you have emotions, and mine were provoked by watching a bogglingly brilliant performance by a person whom I have covered for many years, whose struggles and triumphs I have related.

In my 45 years of reporting on figure skating, I cannot recall being more emotionally moved by what I was experiencing than I was by watching Alysa Liu win the World Championships.

Yes, Liu's back story (related in other posts on this account) created a context that made the moment so overwhelming I found myself seeing the big picture more than the individual pieces of her performance.

"Nobody's done this," said Phillip DiGuglielmo, one of her coaches. "Nobody walks away and comes back. Lots of people try because they love it, and that's great. They're not successful."

When I went back this morning and closely watched NBC Sports video of her free skate, the whole thing still seemed surreal - or as Liu said to NBC's Andrea Joyce, ''It's insane. I don't know how it happened."

I then saw more clearly that the individual pieces, one by one, had all been done wonderfully, leading to the loudest crowd response I ever have experienced in figure skating. Can you imagine people being able to drown out Donna Summer in full disco mode on an ear-shattering sound system?

Then it was time to go to work describing it all. But what I had felt came back to me as soon as I pushed the key to send the story to my NBC editors.

Who knew you could be gobsmacked just before 10 p.m. and gobsmacked again at 1 a.m. by seeing an experience again in the mind's eye?