Perhaps you remember these folks.
Fresh-faced young sports heroes, the embodiment of the new national spirit, their stories spun out on multiple media platforms, inspirational tales of personal challenges conquered and obstacles overcome, pointing toward that single shining moment when one of them would become the first Canadian to win an Olympic gold medal on home soil, all of that accompanied by the theme song that you just couldn't get out of your head.
That was one year ago.
And this is now.
Tuesday morning, some of the members of Canada's World Cup alpine ski team were introduced to the media at the same downtown Toronto venue where they took the stage almost exactly 12 months earlier.
Many of the faces were the same, as were the corporate sponsors, whose commitment extends at least for this one year beyond the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. But there was no forest of television cameras, no wave upon wave of representatives of the great Olympic media consortium trolling for new biographical details.
Instead, just the two rights-holding television networks, CBC and Rogers Sportsnet, were represented, along with a tiny handful of reporters who like and follow the sport.
There's the new reality - or perhaps more accurately, the old reality - in the wake of the great patriotic sports orgy that climaxed last February with the Winter Games of Vancouver and Whistler.
"We knew there was going to be a lull afterwards," downhiller Manuel Osborne-Paradis said. "It is a bit of a downer to see this turn out at this kind of thing."
The skiers didn't produce a single medal in Whistler, but in terms of post-Olympic attention, they do enjoy a couple of advantages over some of their Canadian confreres. Unlike, say, the sliding sports, or cross country skiing, or biathlon, alpine skiing has always enjoyed at least a core following - and an audience significantly larger than that during the glory days of the Crazy Canucks in the 1970s and '80s.
Canadians' temporary passion for skeleton in 2010 is going to be awfully difficult to reignite, but other than figure skating, curling and hockey, the World Cup circuit has the most mainstream appeal of all the Winter Olympic sports.
And this is a team blessed with strong, appealing personalities who are just beginning to come into their own.
Last year, Erik Guay closed the season in spectacular fashion following his two fifth-place finishes in Whistler, winning the crystal globe as the world super giant slalom champ. And Osborne-Paradis won two races, finished on the podium in the classic Lauberhorn downhill in Switzerland, and is already considered among the world's best in the sport's glamour event.
(Osborne-Paradis, by the way, said he has no regrets about his performance at the 2010 Games, where a single, crucial error cost him any chance at the downhill gold medal. "I would never redo anything," he said. "That's the beauty of sports. You get one chance to do it. There's no redo. There's no, 'I'll do it better next time.' That was my Olympic experience, and I liked what I got out of it.") Add in John Kucera, who won the downhill at the world alpine championship in 2009, but had his Olympic dreams dashed when he broke his leg last fall at Lake Louise, Alta., fast-rising Robbie Dixon, Michael Janyk, who finished in the top 10 in the slalom standings, and grizzled vet Jan Hudec, and there are all kinds of possibilities among the men. (The women's team, aside from Kelly VanderBeek, returning from injury, Britt Janyk, and perhaps Larisa Yurkiw, is in rebuilding mode.) No, it is not going to be like it was last season. You're not going to hear much about how Hudec's parents escaped from Czechoslovakia, about how the Janyks grew up on the slopes in Whistler, about Kucera's passion for motorcycles or the camp Osborne-Paradis runs for kids or how Dixon competes despite severe hearing loss. They're still great stories, but without the focus of a home Olympics, without the tremendous marshalling of resources and the myriad possibilities for making a buck, they just won't get told the same way.
But perhaps just a little bit of that Olympic magic will stick. Perhaps when a result turns up in the paper or flicking by a race on television, Canadians will remember how they got to know these people, how they embraced them, how they lived and died with them for the better part of three weeks last February.
They deserve at least that much.