VANCOUVER • Her new silver bling pinging with her earlier bronze, a U.S. flag still serving as a shawl, a merry but bleary Katherine Reutter had a regret or two the morning after a night of celebrating her silver medal performance in the women's short track speedskating 1000-meter race on Friday night.

Despite appearances, after all, she already had failed to make good on plans not to remove either of the symbols of her breakthrough.

"Wish I could say I slept with the flag on," said Reutter, the Champaign, Ill., native whose crucial early speedskating development was in St. Louis. "I didn't, but it was only because I was so tired. Tonight, I will be sleeping with the flag on."

Reutter also confessed to not sleeping with her medals on.

"Because if you wear them together, they clink together, and they make little marks, and I'm really upset that my medals are a little scuffed already," she said. "So I have to be really careful when I wear them together."

If Reutter sounded a little goofy, it was with good reason. In the 12 hours or so since she had won the silver, she had gone through a medal ceremony at Pacific Coliseum, numerous media interviews and been whisked to USA House as part of a broader celebration where she signed 150 autographs and posed for 200 pictures, by her reckoning. She returned back to her Olympic Village room shortly after 1 a.m. only to give up on sleeping since she had a date with The Today Show about two hours later. Finally, she slept from about 5 -7 a.m. before getting up to meet the print media at the Main Press Center and being ushered back through various TV appearances — all the while wearing her medals as her credentials "just to say that I can."

As comfortable as she already seemed with her newfound glory, Reutter still was groping to capture the moment — a moment that came only hours after she had what she called a "breakdown" crying to team sports psychologist Nicole Detling Miller after feeling gridlocked by an Olympic performance largely characterized by her tendency toward paralysis by analysis.

Miller couldn't recalled Reutter's precise words, but the alarming message was along the lines of, "I don't even know if I can do this any more."

"I wouldn't say it was catastrophic," Miller said Saturday, "but it certainly had potential to go to that level."

No wonder that after her triumphant moment Reutter screamed and screamed and just keep zooming around the ice, pumping her arms, then hoisting the U.S. flag above her head.

"It felt like nothing I have ever daydreamed or imagined before," she said, adding, "I've never been happier in my whole life, and I've never been able to scream so loud that I actually felt like I was capturing every emotion that I was feeling."

But even as she basked in the moment, Reutter, 21, radiated nothing more than gratitude — particularly when it came to her parents, Beth and Jay.

"They built the foundation of who I am as a person and an athlete, and I intend to give back every sacrifice they've ever given me," she said.

Beginning with their own foundation.

At about 3:30 a.m. Saturday, Katherine told her mother that she planned to give the entire $25,000 in U.S. Olympic Committee bonus money to them to pay for structural issues developing in their house. Cracked and warped walls and strange tilted slopes tipped off Katherine, though her parents hadn't brought it up.

Beth Reutter was speechless over her daughter's offer.

"I don't think I'll ever be able to show her all the things that she's shown me," Katherine said, "but this is a small way I can."

There were, of course, may others to thank. She started with "everyone in the whole world" but ultimately turned to a more finite group.

There was Champaign icon Bonnie Blair, the onetime short track skater who earned five gold medals among her six in long track; who years ago signed a poster to little Katherine Reutter saying, "Best Wishes And Go For The Gold"; whose training slide-board was passed down by the Blair family to the Reutters, who reassured 16-year-old Katherine that leaving home to live and train in Marquette, Mich., was worth it.

Murmurs of Blair's presence at her race Friday seemed to evoke the same excitement in Reutter, 21, that it might have a decade ago.

"I love when she comes out and watches me race. And I heard that she was even like really nervous and kind of like commenting on the race, like, 'What's she doing in the back? She never sits in back. She needs to get in the front,'" said Reutter, who got advice from Blair before leaving for Vancouver. "I don't think she's tried to, but she's shaped my career."

And then there were her coaches at the Gateway and Metro speedskating clubs in St. Louis, the clubs she likes to identify herself with, clubs that over a three-year period her parents often would drive six-hours round-trip twice a week, where she worked with 'some of the best coaches and some of the best people I could work with, and being around them really blossomed my career."

More recently, there was U.S. short track coach Chun Jae Su, upon whom she bestowed a congratulatory medal late Friday.

Through long, grinding sessions at their training center in Park City, Utah, Reutter began to think about the idea of breaking up the so-called "Great Wall of China" on the ice and earning the first U.S. women's short track medal since 1994.

But all that seemed to be evaporating in her first competitions here, when she finished seventh and fourth in her individual races and was part of a bronze that for a relay team was far behind but medaled after Korea was disqualified.

"I came into the Olympics trying so hard to think of it as just another World Cup, just something that I could be in control of," she said. "But I didn't feel that way. I felt like I was constantly racing someone else's race and that they were pushing me outside of my comfort zone."

So much so that by Friday morning she was crying, telling Miller "the pressure's so much, and I don't know if I can do it."

Ultimately, Miller helped her let go of the past races and think of the words making up the acronym WIN — "what's important now."

Reutter embraced the thoughts, realizing her physical ability was the same as what had earned her a world No. 2 ranking in the 1,000 and that she could get the doubts out by allowing herself to be herself and not a tentative bundle of worry.

So when Reutter unclenched and exhaled and finally became who she was, agent Patrick Quinn said, it was like catching the first glimpse of a loved one, a joy of arrival. He also believes her silver could bode a brilliant future with potential sponsors based on her youthfulness, wholesomeness and arrival on the scene.

Already Reutter is looking to the 2014 Sochi Games, assuring that she'll 'shut my brain off … and race like I'm capable of."

But all of that can wait for now.

Now, she said, she feels "complete," and she has the medals and flag to show it.

"Somebody's going to have to take it away from me before I stop wearing it," she said, adding, "It's going to at least be within an arm's reach away for three weeks."