Now comes the fun part

The last time - nay, the only time - Canada won an Olympic medal in ice dancing, Scott Moir was five months old. His partner, Tessa Virtue, wouldn't come along for another 15 months. That medal too was an indelible performance on Canadian ice, when Rob McCall and Tracy Wilson took bronze in Calgary.

Usually in figure skating, skaters spend years slowly climbing out of obscurity, inching up the standings in tiny increments, season in, season out. Longevity and perseverance are rewarded almost as much as talent and athleticism. What makes Virtue and Moir's championship performance tonight so stellar is that they have come, if not exactly out of nowhere, then certainly a lot farther than we had any right to expect at this point in their young careers, considering they first placed a toe on the world stage in 2007.

By the time folks win at the Olympics, they've usually picked up some World championship placings, some national titles, and while they are presumably happy to win at the Olympics, they have long since learned to be disciplined, at least in public.

No such worries here. The sheer exuberance and delight on display from both Virtue and Moir the moment they realized they had won the gold was exceptional, both for the rarity of such overt emotion in the figure skating world and the uncluttered joy of attaining that pinnacle at home. Eleven thousand fans sang O Canada to them as the flag was raised and the official anthem played after the medal presentation - what must that feel like ?

And to win, not only with an exceptional program, but also by accepting the challenge laid down by training partners and friends Charlie White and Meryl Davis of the U.S.team, who had skated a flawless program a bit earlier in the evening. If you really want it, show us, they said - beat this. And so they did, by a score so high, it wasn't even close, leaving the Americans to polish their silver medals one rung below on the podium.

But here's the really fun, exciting part - Virtue & Moir, White & Davis, are only in their early 20s. They should have been trying for top 10 finishes at this point in their careers, not taking the top two spots. They train together and push each other, and the results of that daily competition are obvious on the ice. Not since Torvill and Dean took on a passel of Russian teams in the early to mid 1980s has the sport of ice dance stood to gain so much from professional rivalry. Barring catastrophic injury, we as an audience can expect to see these four jockeying for position on podiums around the planet for probably the next decade - including a couple more Olympics. It promises to be a developmentally rich experience as well, as each team will have to keep raising the bar in creative and dynamic ways to stay ahead of the other. As lovers of the sport, we can all be thankful for that. My only hope is that the Canadians continue to enjoy their success as much as they have tonight, and that we are never faced with a ceremony where they stand atop the podium looking as if it's just been another day at the office.