They call gymnastics a team sport, but everyone knows better than that.

　　They say nobody loses a gold medal all by themselves, but Alicia Sacramone wasn’t buying it.

　　“No one else made mistakes,” Sacramone said Wednesday, trying to blink back the tears but knowing there would be more to come after her sad Olympic moment in the women’s team final.

　　“So it’s kind of my fault.”

　　She fell off the beam before her routine had really even started.

　　She fell on her backside in the middle of her floor exercise.

　　She sat on the stairs, her head buried in her hands, trying to be tough, to live up to the den-mother persona she has earned as the captain of the American team.

　　She and her teammates walked away with a silver medal―not the goal for a team with the world’s two best gymnasts, Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin, and all that gold-medal potential.

　　“I think everybody knows you always have good days and bad days,” Sacramone said after America’s loss to China. “I just wish today was a good day.”

　　She has practiced her balance beam routine dozens of times a week, hundreds of times over the past year. For Sacramone, the art of bounding from the springboard and doing a forward somersault to get things started is about as routine as getting out of bed.

　　They practice different scenarios at her gym outside of Boston―pumping in crowd noise, doing the routine with warmup, without warmup, on different kinds of equipment, etc., etc.

　　One thing they can’t simulate is how to react when the judges take a long, unexplained break right before the routine, while Sacramone is standing on the podium waiting to go. At the biggest meet of her life, no less.

　　Which is exactly what happened Wednesday.

　　“This was one of those things,” said her coach, Mihai Brestyan. “You’re ready to go, and the judges find the momentum to talk. Then you’re ready to go the second time and they’re talking again. And you refocus and refocus and you’re ready to go and you get out of your line and you keep going back.”

　　And you fall.

　　Asking her about the Xs and Os of how she fell from the 4-inch-wide beam― or never really landed on it to begin with―felt like a cruel exercise by the time she walked into the interview area, her eyes red and hand held tight by teammate Samantha Peszek, who insisted she would stay by her best friend’s side through the whole ordeal.

　　“I snapped pretty quickly on the board,” Sacramone said. “I tried to adjust in the air, but I couldn’t save it. I had only one foot on the beam, tried to step back and there was nothing there for my foot to be on.”

　　Sacramone has never made any bones about it―she’s emotional. So the fact that she followed the beam debacle with another unsightly spill on the floor exercise―the spill that irreversibly put the gold out of reach―wasn’t that big a shock.

　　“It was a little too hard for me to get out of that funk,” she said.

　　Maybe the cruelest part of this unforgiving sport is that it is in the spotlight only once every four years. Performances at the Olympics can define a gymnast, turn them into one-name personalities: Nadia, Mary Lou, maybe Shawn or Nastia in a day or two.

　　Sad, then, that few will talk about Alicia’s clutch performance last year at world championships, when it was Liukin who blew her beam routine and Sacramone who followed up on floor with a number that saved the day and helped win the gold.

　　It was an act filled with the trademark spice that hard-core gymnastics fans had grown to love: Sacramone seductively running her hand down her leg, then flinging her arms open to the crowd as if to say, “I’ll be appearing here nightly at 9.”

　　That floor exercise won her a world championship in 2005, a silver medal in 2007 and might have won her another medal in 2006 if not for a confusing and picayune judging decision.

　　After the routine that helped win the team gold in 2007, Sacramone sounded like the leader she has grown to be: “I told them, ‘Everyone makes mistakes, but we still have one more event and it’s one of our best events, so we might as well go out there and have fun and show everybody what we’ve got.’”

　　On Wednesday, there was none of that confidence. The trademark sizzle was gone. She used to bat her eyes at judges walking off the floor.

　　This time, she didn’t even look over.

　　“It’s hard,” Liukin said. “She kept telling us she was sorry, but it’s really hard to know what to say.”

　　What was there to say, that it was OK? Sacramone wouldn’t believe that.

　　That she’ll get ‘em next time? The Olympics don’t work that way.

　　That the sun will come up tomorrow? Indeed it will. And Sacramone will still be looking at a silver medal.

　　“My teammates were amazing today,” she said, forcing a smile to hold back the tears. “I just wish my performance had been a little bit better.”