Gold

VANCOUVER - Angela Ruggiero is tougher than you are. When she cried last night, it wasn't because her fourth Olympics ended with a silver medal instead of gold. It was because her fourth Olympics ended. This giant of women's ice hockey cried because last night's 2-0 defeat to gold medal-winning Canada was certainly her last game with this U.S. team, and might be her last with any team. "It's really hard," Ruggiero said, tears streaming down her cheeks. "You give your life to this game, and you come up short as a team, it's just hard.

A long-awaited Scandinavian Olympic gold-medal matchup between Sweden and Finland - two fierce rivals - will mark the send-off to the hockey tournament at the Winter Games. It also will guarantee that one member of the Flyers comes home with gold - Finland's Antero Niittymaki or Sweden's Peter Forsberg - tomorrow. Niittymaki earned his third shutout of the Games last night with 21 saves at Palasport Olimpico as Finland stunned Russia, 4-0. Asked whether he ever thought he'd be playing for a gold medal, Niittymaki said: "Probably not. We knew we had a good chance if we played well.

The Region 1 (Southeastern) girls' scholastic basketball team, led by Archbishop Carroll's Lynn Dougherty, won a gold medal over the weekend at the fifth annual Keystone State Games here by defeating Region 3 (Central), 86-77. Dougherty, who scored infrequently for the Patriots varsity last season, tallied in double figures in all four of Region 1's games, including 21 in the tourney-opening 89-55 defeat of the Region 4 team from the west. Dougherty, who will be a junior, followed with 19 points in a 76-70 overtime thriller over Region 3, including 9 points in the extra period.

Carmelo Anthony has a message for Argentina, Lithuania and the other best basketball teams from around the world: The United States is going to win at the Athens Olympics. "We're guaranteeing a gold medal. We're bringing it back," Anthony boldly predicted yesterday on his first day of practice with the U.S. national team in Jacksonville, Fla. It took very little prodding for Anthony to basically repeat what he said last week on David Letterman's late-night television talk show.

When Ivan Robinson was 9 years old he was banned from boxing - a move that hit him like an overhand right to the temple. His parents, upset at his antics in school, grounded him for three weeks. Not three weeks away from the movies, the candy stores or the recreation centers. Three weeks away from the ring, a piece of real estate more wonderful than any playground in the world. "I messed up real bad, being the class clown and all, and my dad took boxing away from me," Robinson recalled.

Roger Kingdom won the gold medal in the 110-meter hurdles at the World University Games in Duisburg, West Germany, but cold weather and muscle stiffness prevented the two-time Olympic champion from challenging his own world record. Kingdom won easily, but his time of 13.26 seconds was well outside his two- week-old world record of 12.92. Americans also won three gold medals in relays on the final day of the Games, tying them with the Soviet Union for the lead with nine. The U.S. women's 400-meter relay team of Michelle Finn, Anita Howard, Lamonda Miller and Esther Jones took the gold with a meet-record time of 42.40, breaking the mark of 42.82 set in 1983 by another U.S. team.

Tyler Hamilton's title from the Athens Olympics is "no longer a gold medal in the eyes of the world" because of the cyclist's failed drug test, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency said yesterday. WADA chief Dick Pound suggested the American got away with cheating in Athens, where a preliminary test indicated he had received an endurance-boosting blood transfusion. The IOC dropped its probe because Hamilton's backup specimen mistakenly was frozen and there weren't enough red-blood cells left to analyze.

When Sean Hansen watched his younger brother swim the length of a pool in December 2010 for the first time since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the coach side of him saw an athlete who still could contend for an Olympic medal. But, as a brother, he hesitated to say so. He recalled too vividly the scene in Beijing when former Havertown resident Brendan Hansen, devastated by his fourth-place finish in the 100-meter breaststroke, found him after the race and "just lost it. " "He was like, 'This isn't fair, I do everything that I'm supposed to do, I always feel like everybody else gets theirs, I'm not getting mine.

It was an unusual state-championship meet for Erich Davis. For the first time since his freshman year, the Wissahickon senior went home from Shippensburg University without a gold medal. Davis wasn't empty-handed, however. He was second in the 400 meters and fourth in the 200, in which he was the defending state champion. He also anchored the Trojans to fourth place in the 1,600-meter relay, an event in which he had won a gold medal as a sophomore. "We ran our best time, so that's OK," Davis said of the 3-minute, 19.82- second relay performance.

Once, they reveled in the rivalry. Olympic gold medalist Carol Bower still remembers the sweet afternoon in 1980 when her U.S. women's rowing team went head to head with its fiercest competitors - the East Germans - and won. "By two-tenths of a second," she says, still savoring the international competition in Switzerland. For many American rowers, that regatta served as a substitute to the boycotted 1980 Olympics. Gabriele Cipollone, a two-time Olympic gold medalist for East Germany, chuckles at the memory, hastening to add that the next day the East Germans bounced back, winning a race against the U.S.A.