MINNEAPOLIS -- At the end of a year headed nowhere, Jenni Meno and Todd Sand wound up somewhere they'd never been before.

With American flags waving around them, the three-time U.S. champions whose careers seemed on the wane stepped onto the medals podium at the World Figure Skating Championships. In their final performance before turning professional, Meno and Sand said goodbye with silver.

"It's been a

Americans Jenni Meno and Todd Sand saved their best international performance for last. (AP)

nice long career for Jenni and I," Sand said Wednesday night after he and his wife finished second to Olympic silver medalists Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze. "We had a lot of ups and downs, especially over the last 18 months. Some things really didn't go the way we planned.

"WE ARE REALLY HAPPY we came here and we skated from our heart and went out on a high note."

Meno and Sand's year started ignominiously when she injured her ankle at the U.S. nationals. They withdrew, then were placed on the Olympic team.

Nagano was no better - they came in eighth, never in medals contention.

So they came to Minneapolis as longshots and left with their best international finish, winning the short program and winding up second in the free skate in a watered-down field.

Meno and Sand skated an ultra-conservative program, seemingly happy to settle for any medal. They didn't do a side-by-side triple jump -- the curse of Sand's career - and Meno fell on their only throw triple, a salchow.

BUT THERE WERE POINTS WHERE their performance flowed and their lifts were strong.

"Todd and I came here to skate for ourselves and that was just what we did," Meno said. "Last night we skated the best that we could and we feel really great about that. Tonight, we tried to skate for ourselves and the crowd and really enjoyed ourselves. This is our last performance as eligible skaters. It was great."

Not great enough for gold, but that's quibbling. In a normal year, without the Olympics and with all the top couples on hand, Meno and Sand might have remained also-rans, as they've been for nearly three years. But that also is quibbling.

They can head into the pro ranks or into parenthood knowing that even if their Olympics weren't memorable, their swan song to the eligible ranks was.

Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze swept the judges with a slow but solid routine. They outskated a field missing the Olympic gold and bronze medalists, plus two-time U.S. champions Kyoko Ina and Jason Dungjen. All were absent due to illness or injury.

BEREZHNAYA, WHO NEARLY DIED from a skating injury in January 1996 -- her former partner's blade cut her head and she sank into a coma -- joined with Sikharulidze in the summer of that year. They made a meteoric rise through the ranks of Russian pairs, always the deepest of any nation, and were favored for Nagano.

Instead, they were beaten by their training partners, Oksana Kazakova and Artur Dmitriev. The Olympic winners withdrew Tuesday when Dmitriev came down with food poisoning.

"She was a very sick person. I cared for her not as a student, but as a little girl who was injured," said Tamara Moskvina, coach of the top two Russian pairs. "As she was stronger, stronger, stronger, then I started to think I could teach her.

"She's been at the border between life and death. The strength of the competition doesn't compare with the threshold between death and life."

Germany's Peggy Schwarz and Mirko Muller struggled through a rather dull routine, but it was good enough to give them third. They were ninth in the Olympics.

POLAND'S DOROTA ZAGORSKA SMACKED head-first into the sideboards during warmups on a throw double axel. She was helped to the end boards by partner Mariusz Siudek, but soon resumed the warmup, hitting the maneuver on the next attempt.

Zagorska held her chin several times while warming up, but the couple returned to the ice to wind up the competition, finishing fifth.

"This is the first time we have taken such a bad fall in competition," she said. "My head is hurting."

The results must have seemed ironic to Ina and Dungjen, who withdrew Monday after a training accident. Ina's elbow struck Dungjen's forehead during a triple twist, giving him a concussion and a broken bone above the eye and injuring her arm.

The American champions seemed to be closing in on the Europeans -- winners of all but two world crowns since 1979, when the last U.S. couple, Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, took the title. But they weren't sharp at Nagano, finishing fourth, and were unlucky in Minneapolis where, with good health, Ina and Dungjen figured to medal.

INSTEAD, IT WAS MENO AND SAND adding silver to their world bronzes of 1995 and '96.

Shelby Lyons and Brian Wells, who replaced Ina and Dungjen at the last minute, finished 10th. The combined total of the American couples' placements means the United States will have three pairs in next year's world championships.

"For that short notice, it felt like a normal competition," Lyons said. "I don't know if I could have done any better if I had been training."