WICHITA, Kansas – When Alysa Liu called her former coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, about a year ago to say that she wanted to return to competitive skating, he tried to talk her out of it.

He tried so hard that one glass of wine led to another, until DiGuglielmo had put down a whole bottle in a vain two-hour effort to convince her by enumerating all the reasons why coming back would be tortuous, maybe even torturous — and certainly a bad idea.

What he didn’t know then was how much Liu had changed in the time since she had announced her retirement at the end of the 2022 season, when she was plainly sick of skating.

“I wouldn’t ask any elite athlete to take two years off of skating,” DiGuglielmo said Thursday night, after Liu won the short program at the Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships, “but maybe that was what made her this good, because she had time to mature.”