Eve Muirhead led her Golden Curls to Olympic glory at the fourth attempt - then revealed the lengths they had gone to beat adversity.
Team GB were crowned ice queens just hours before the curtain fell on these Beijing Games, thrashing Japan 10-3 in the women’s final.
Muirhead, Britain’s skip, was the match-winner, delivering a brilliant raised take-out in the seventh to score four and end Japanese resistance.
It brought redemption for the Scot who four years before had missed a relatively easy final shot to gift Bronze to the same opponents.
“It’s definitely been a rollercoaster journey,” said Muirhead, who emulated the gold medal achievement of Rhona Martin, now Howie, exactly 20 years ago.
“There were days I just wanted to throw my shoes in the cupboard and not take them out again.”
Hailed as Thrilling Eve when she became the youngest skip to win an Olympic medal at the age of 23, Muirhead had to deal with a second straight semi-final defeat four years later.
She then underwent hip surgery before her team flopped so badly at the world championships last summer that GB Curling bosses disbanded them.
A nine-woman squad was instead introduced with no guarantees on selection, even for Muirhead, and when they lost to minnows Turkey weeks later their Olympic hopes hung by a thread.
To go from there to Beijing and winning the only gold medal for a GB team backed to the tune of £22million, brought as much joy to Muirhead as it did relief to UK Sport.
“There have been ups and downs,” she said, recalling how even once in China they faced a tie-breaker just to reach the knockout stages - then trailed 4-0 in their semi-final.
“There have also been a couple of positive [Covid] tests,” she added. “But here we are, five very healthy girls with gold medals round their necks.”
It wasn’t all about Eve. Vicky Wright went from nursing in a Covid ward to the top podium, Jen Dodds overcame the pain of missing a mixed doubles medal - while Hailey Duff was plucked from obscurity.
First to congratulate them was Howie who said: “Eve's resilience to just keep fighting is what sets her apart.
“She can be hard on them, but you need to be. She is driven and determined and she’s got her just reward.”
The challenge for curling is to build on this in a way it failed to after 2002. There is just one open rink outside of Scotland.
Inspiring the nation is one thing, but it counts for little if youngsters cannot give it a go.
Team GB return home with two medals and much food for thought.
However they care to dress it up, the truth is that too many sports in these Olympics are accessible to too few.
