Mike Celizic

TURIN, Italy - Just for a few seconds, try to forget everything you learned about Chad Hedrick over the past two weeks. Forget the Eric Heiden thing and the number five. Forget the feud with Shani Davis. Forget gold medals that weren’t won. Forget it all and focus instead of on the U.S. men’s speedskating team.

They were terrific.

They won three races, medaled in every individual event, had three multiple-medal winners and won seven of the 25 total medals the United States accumulated. For a squad that hadn’t been a world power for quite some time, they buried the mighty Dutch men’s team, seven medals to four and three golds to one.

Joey Cheek won the 500 and took second in the 1,000. Davis won the 1,000 and took second in the 1,500. Hedrick won the 5,000, took second in the 10,000 and third in the 1,500.

There is nothing to apologize for in those results.

The speedskaters filled notebooks, sports pages and highlight reels for two weeks, giving us stories that both made us feel good — Cheek donating his $40,000 in medal bonuses to African famine relief — and elevated our blood pressure — the Chad/Shani thing. And when the story of these Games is written when the big Olympic blowtorch is snuffed Sunday night, the men’s long track speedskating team will play as big a part as any other American team that marched into the Stadio Olimpico on Feb. 10.

Only the combined men’s and women’s snowboard teams matched the skaters for total medals and gold medals. Of the 25 American medals won, 14 were produced by big oval speedskating and snowboarding. Of the nine golds, the two squads contributed six — three each.

So it’s a little hard to put the words “speedskating” and “disappointment” in the same sentence, especially when there are so many other American teams that left so many expectations unfulfilled. It’s always in order to hope for more before the games begin, but once the venue shuts down, the only fair way to judge a squad is by what it did, not by what someone else decided it was supposed to do.

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Not that you want to tell Hedrick that. The reformed in-line skater from Houston, left with the same big smile and the same affable arrogance with which he came. Only he, whose coach, Bart Schouten, had started all the Heiden talk before the Games began, expressed disappointment with what he had done.

He finished his drive for five gold medals with a matched set — gold in the 5,000, silver in Saturday’s final men’s race, the 10,000, and bronze in the 1,500. He finished sixth in the 1,000, an event he entered just to get five medal possibilities.

And he leaves still blaming teammate and rival Davis for depriving him of a chance to win another medal in the team pursuit.

He admitted Saturday, that he bit off more than his panhandle-sized jaws could chew. He held the world record in the 1,500 and finished third, behind Italian Enrico Fabris and Davis. He also held the record in Saturday’s 10,000 and said he had needed every dram of energy and desire he had to hang in for second.

If anybody deprived Hedrick of more personal glory, it was Hedrick himself.

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“In a way, I feel like I left a lot of races out there,” he said when his work was done. “I won my first one and then went oh-for-four.”

The 5,000 was the first race and the one he won. Then there was the team pursuit that Davis sat out and Hedrick participated in. That team didn’t make the medal round despite having the second-best time posted during the elimination rounds; unfortunately the second-best time came against the best team; a different draw would have given the team a medal.

After that, Hedrick ran in the 1,000, an event he had competed in only six previous times in his life. He didn’t medal. When he came back for the 1,500, the race he was supposed to own, he was already running out of gas.

By the 10,000, he was running on fumes.

“The 1,000 meters and 1,500 meters took a lot of snap out of my legs,” he said. “That’s the deal when you go in five events and try for something spectacular.”

He vowed to return for the Vancouver Games in 2010, when he’ll be 32. Davis, his rival, will be there, too. So will the Dutch, who rescued their national honor when they won gold and bronze in the 10,000, with veteran Bob de Jong whipping Hedrick at his own race.

But the next time, Hedrick said, he’ll look at the schedule before deciding which races to enter. It was pretty clear that there will be no more talk of five medals.

Hedrick can be forgiven for thinking it might be easy. He came over to speedskating just three years ago, and he’s still learning his craft. Never having tried to win five events, it sounded easier than it was.

Now that he’s tried it, he understands how the feat is all but impossible. And Hedrick was going for four individual races and a new team race. Heiden won five individual races, from the 500-meter sprint to the 10,000 marathon.

“Eric Heiden,” Hedrick concluded on his way out of town, “is a freak of nature.”

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