Yet the sport went on and another generation stepped up, ready or not. “We were just thrust into it,’’ said Allen, who was only 12 when he made the 1962 team. “It was surreal on so many levels.’’

What was remarkable was how quickly American skating recovered from an incalculable loss. Junior and novice performers matured quickly, new coaches appeared behind the dasher. Three years later, Allen won a bronze medal at the Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, where three US women placed among the top eight and the pairs just missed making the podium.

“I think it shows the popularity of our sport and the resilience of the Am erican people,’’ said Carol Heiss Jenkins, the 1960 Olympic champion who went on to become a prominent coach.

Since the end of World War II, US skating had benefited from an incomparably productive pipeline. The men had won four consecutive titles at Olympus and 12 straight world crowns. The women had won back-to-back Olympic golds and the pairs had made the podium at two of the previous three Games. After 1960, the usual changeover took place, with all of the medalists moving on and their successors moving up.

“I roomed with Laurence Owen in Squaw Valley and she asked me if I was going on,’’ remembered Heiss Jenkins, who’d won the silver behind Tenley Albright in 1956. “I said no and she said good. In those days there was no returning to the sport once you’d turned professional. Those were the days of Avery Brundage [as president of the International Olympic Committee].’’

So Heiss Jenkins, Barbara Roles, David Jenkins, and Nancy and Ron Ludington took their leave, followed by a promising group with Boston roots. Owen, a Winchester, Mass., native who appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated after winning the 1961 title, seemed destined for Olympic gold. “She had a spark, a flair,’’ said Paul George, a clubmate of Owen who named his daughter after her. “She had the right stuff.’’

Owen’s sister, Maribel, had won the pairs crown with Dudley Richards, who’d been Ted Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard. And Bradley Lord of Swampscott had taken the men’s title. “They’re all gone,’’ Jenkins told his sister-in-law by phone after the Sabena flight had fallen out of the sky just before landing in Brussels. The shock was particularly acute at the Skating Club of Boston, where all of the locals had trained. “The rink went absolutely silent,’’ recalled George, who spent the rest of February attending funerals. “I don’t think the Skating Club has ever been the same.’’

Next generation Yet Boston was where the renaissance began with the 1962 national championships, which were held at the Skating Club and at Boston College’s McHugh Forum. The fields were small — six women and four men — and so green that Roles, who’d won the bronze at Squaw Valley and had since had a baby, was coaxed back into competition.

Despite the lack of experience and depth, there was promise. “It doesn’t take long,’’ observed Ron Ludington, who’d gone directly from competing to coaching. “They grow quickly, and the younger they are, the faster they grow.’’ No generation of American skaters had been fast-forwarded as abruptly as that one, yet they quickly came up to the mark.

“The crash had a subtle and profound effect — to create resolve on the part of the skaters to get back on the ice and work a little harder,’’ said George, who won the 1962 junior pairs title with his sister, Elizabeth. “It instantly took away our youthful and carefree ways.’’

The two men on the world team, Monty Hoyt and Allen, were a combined 29 years old. “We had a very young team trying to fill the shoes of veteran skaters,’’ recalled Allen. “There was pressure to fare as well as we could.’’ Hoyt finished sixth in Prague, Allen eighth. Roles placed fifth, earning the women a third entry for the following year. It was the first time since 1937 that the Americans had missed medaling in both events, yet given the daunting rebuilding task it was significant that they were competitive at all.

The more complicated challenge was replacing not only the coaches who’d died, such as Maribel Vinson Owen and Edi Scholdan, but also the skaters who likely would have become coaches themselves. The arrival of Carlo Fassi and John A.W. Nicks, two prominent foreign coaches, was an obvious boost. Fassi directed Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill to Olympic gold and Nicks tutored world medalists JoJo Starbuck-Ken Shelley and Tai Babilonia-Randy Gardner.

“John had a tremendous understanding of artistry and he carried that over to his skaters,’’ said Ludington. “Carlo was a great technician. The discipline of figures in Europe was very strong.’’ Not that the continental influence was new. Swiss emigre Gus Lussi had coached Dick Button to Olympic titles in 1948 and 1952. Scholdan, who’d directed Hayes Alan Jenkins and David Jenkins to gold in 1956 and 1960, came from Austria. And French transplant Pierre Brunet had mentored Heiss Jenkins. “We’d already had the foreign influx,’’ she observed.

Vinson Owen, the sport’s mother hen who’d coached Albright to the 1956 gold medal, had left behind an impressive brood of tutees, most notably Carroll, who coached Olympic medalists Linda Fratianne, Michelle Kwan, Tim Goebel, and Evan Lysacek, and Ludington, whose students included Olympic medalists Kitty and Peter Carruthers. “We had coaches who’d learned from the best,’’ said Carroll, who’d been a junior medalist in 1960, “and they could infuse that same level of expectation and accomplishment that had gone on before the crash.’’

Tradition continues Matching that level at the 1964 Games was unrealistic. None of the team members had Olympic experience and none had won world medals. Allen, who’d won the US title, still was only 14, then and now the youngest men’s champion. Fleming, the women’s winner, was 15. So was Arlington, Mass., skater Tina Noyes, who finished second. “I was hoping to be on the Olympic team but I had no idea that it would come to be,’’ said Noyes, who’d been the junior titlist the year before. “They went with a whole new team.’’

Had she lived, Owen might well have continued the string of American women champions. Sjoukje Dijkstra, the Dutch dynamo who won her country’s only Olympic skating crown, was sturdy and athletic. “Laurence was a completely different skater, a soft and willowy free spirit,’’ said Heiss Jenkins, who’d beaten Dijkstra in 1960. “Sjoukje was more of a powerhouse.’’

Fleming finished sixth in Innsbruck but went on to win in 1968, beginning a series of 11 consecutive podium finishes by her countrywomen at the Games. And Allen, who’d been fifth at the previous year’s world championships in Italy, grabbed the bronze. “I was just excited about wearing the uniform,’’ he remembered. “I was ecstatic about the fact that I performed well and that there was a good result.’’

What was as important to American skating was that the Stars and Stripes was flapping from the flagpole, that the podium tradition that began with Button was uninterrupted. Since then US competitors have won at least one medal at every Games and produced eight men’s and women’s champions. “The thread goes back to 1961,’’ said George, who gave the speech at yesterday’s Hall of Fame induction for the entire traveling party.

Half a century later the legacy of the doomed team continues, most significantly with the Memorial Fund, which has provided millions of dollars in subsidies to thousands of skaters. The 1961 skaters themselves are featured in “Indelible Tracings,’’ a newly published book by Patricia Shelley Bushman, and “Rise,’’ a commemorative film that will be shown in theaters nationally Feb. 17, two days after the anniversary of the crash.

American skating rose from that wreckage but for those who knew the smiling faces in the haunting photo that was snapped before takeoff at Idlewild Airport, the sense of irrevocable loss endures. “I was at the gym recently and I was thinking about the last time I saw Maribel and Laurence,’’ mused Carroll. “Here I am, 72 years old, and I began to cry.’’

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.