You write this screenplay for a biopic about a figure skater and take it to Hollywood.

You start with a kid whose immigrant father puts her on the ice at age five. You skip ahead to show her as a 13-year-old beating adults to win back-national titles when she is too young to compete at even the junior level internationally. You get her to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing when she is just 16.

You have her retire a few months later because she hates a sport that is no longer what she wants to do, hates that it has consumed her life.

You have a great section where she tosses her skates into a closet, where they stay while she hangs out with her friends and four siblings and starts college. Then you watch her take them out 18 months later, go to a rink and land a triple jump as if she never had been away.  You see her convince her old coaches to take her back because she wants to compete again—on her terms, not someone else’s.

You make the kid who once saw her sport as a grim exercise to be endured turn into a young woman who can’t stop smiling as she skates and practices skating and, heck, maybe even as she sleeps.

And that’s not even the half of it (don’t forget the spies) before you get to the final scene.

That’s the scene in which you see the kid at 20, in a sparkly golden dress, with her hair dyed in brown and gold bands, winning the Olympic gold medal in women’s singles.

One after another, studio poohbahs tell you this must be fiction, that too many parts of the plot are too crazy, that no one will buy it as a biopic.

The truth is Alysa Liu followed the plot exactly Thursday in Milan. And everything else is also true in one of the most delightfully improbable and wonderfully joyous sports stories you have ever written.

“The journey,” Liu said.  “I love it. I love it.”

This phase of it ended when Liu did an striking free skate to the Donna Summer cover of “MacArthur Park,” a version that starts mournfully and then switches to upbeat disco, a mood change appropriately echoing what Liu has gone through in she skating career.

“Alysa is different,” said Phillip DiGuglielmo, who coaches Liu with Massimo Scali.  “We know she wasn’t here to win a medal.  She was here to skate and to enjoy it.”

Liu was in third place after the short program and first after doing her free, with two women yet to compete, ingenue Ami Nakai of Japan and Nakai’s countrywoman, veteran Kaori Sakamoto, a three-time world champion. Liu sat in the leader’s chair, grinning as usual.

“Maybe I’m just happy,” she said.  “I’ve got no poker face.”

She was very happy with her winning free skate, and no wonder. It was almost flawless technically and exactly the captivating performance she hoped to give on her sport’s biggest stage, her gestures and body positions as scintillating as her dress.

“I’m really grateful that I got the chance to showcase my art and my ideas,” she said.

Sakamoto, 25, made one costly error, a wonky landing on a triple flip that prevented her from adding a planned triple toe loop to it.  That omitted jump was the mathematical difference between silver and gold.

Nakai, 17, made several mistakes, wound up ninth in the free skate but came away with a bronze medal.

Liu was less focused with hearing their scores and figuring out what they meant to her than she was on running over to hug each one of them.

What they meant is Liu had become the first U.S. woman to win Olympic singles gold since Sarah Hughes in 2002. A year earlier, she had become the first U.S. woman to win the world title since Kimmie Meissner in 2006.

“These titles are huge, but I don’t want them to overshadow who I am and what I do and what I am all about,” Liu said. “Winning isn’t all that, and neither is losing.”

For the record, Liu—who also won gold in the team event—wound up with 226.79 points to 224.90 for Sakamoto and 219.16 for Nakai.

Who Liu is changed dramatically when she retired rather than be, in her words, “stuck in something so long.”

“It was the best thing I could have done for myself,” she said. “Through retirement, I realized I am a little bit like a creative person, and I have these ideas. I have my own sense of fashion and I’m a little bit stubborn with it. I love choreography and music, and I do it on my own terms. No one tells me what to do.”

So, when some athletes might have been dead serious in the time right before what seemed the biggest moment of their lives, Liu did it her way. That meant taking pictures of her coaches and doing an interview with NBC’s Andrea Joyce and waving at the crowd during the warmup preceding her doing the free skate.

“The feelings I had out there were calm, happy and confident,” she said.

Her confidence has been reflected in how well she has jumped in the past two seasons.

Liu fell on the third jumping pass in her first event of her comeback, in September 2024. Since then, she has had 221 jumps over 150 jumping passes without a fall—a remarkable consistency, notwithstanding that many of those jumps got negative grades of execution.

That means she understands that to show your art, you are better off training hard enough to avoid shattering the image with a splat. She may meander from subject to subject in answering questions, but she did not wander off in practices.

And then there is the truth-stranger-than-fiction plot, with includes her rebellion against skating but not against her good relationship with her father, Arthur. He had to flee China after he was involved in pro-democracy protests at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. In 2022, the U.S. government charged five men for acting on behalf of the Chinese government by spying on Liu and his family.

“I just feel lucky,” Liu said. “I mean, even the bad parts of my life, I am grateful for. I wouldn’t be here without the rollercoaster.”

Roll the credits.

Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at 13 straight Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCOlympics.com.