All of us who heard Gracie Gold’s words after she came undone in the free skate at last year’s World Figure Skating Championships in Boston were stunned by how extreme her reaction sounded.

She called her performance "unfortunate and sad."  She said she was ashamed of how she skated. She apologized to the country and the crowd for doing so poorly and finishing fourth after having won the short program.  She nearly wrote off her chances for doing well at the 2018 Olympics.

Truth be told, Gold’s really poor skating was yet to come.  She staggered to fourth and eighth at her two Grand Prix events this fall and then a dismaying sixth at a lower-level Croatian competition in which she barely could land a jump and wound up with her worst scores in nearly four years.

Only recently has Gold realized that her feelings about Boston were an overreaction that kept compounding the problem.  She could not move on because she would not pardon herself.