For more than a decade, Michelle Kwan represented what we in the journalism call a “standing story”.

A standing story is one that is news at any time. Work or play, good or bad, any developments warrant coverage and follow-up because we believe our audience has significant interest in the topic.

Particularly so, in my case, because Michelle Kwan trained for years at a rink just up the hill from where I was sports editor … and also because I covered the four Winter Olympics where she made appearances — though she skated at only two of them.

It wasn’t like I (or her fans) forgot about her; she was one of the most popular of U.S. Olympians when she finally exited the figure-skating stage, in 2009, announcing she would go to school rather than attempt to compete at the 2010 Winter Games — where she would have been making a fifth attempt at winning Olympic gold.

Thus, she ended her career with two Olympic medals (a silver and a gold), five world championships and nine national championships.

But no Olympic gold.

Kwan has done several interesting things since 2009 … school, political activism (she campaigned for Hillary Clinton), a board-of-directors role with the Special Olympics and a 2013 marriage — now in the process of being ended — to the scion of a Rhode Island political family.

I knew little of any of that, and would have remained uninformed had not Kwan been photographed while visiting an Abu Dhabi skating rink last week.

I worked in the UAE for seven years, and public-relations people still send me information, and …

There was Kwan, looking trim and fit, at age 37, on the ice at Zayed Sports City in Abu Dhabi, perhaps giving some tips to the UAE’s No. 1 female skater, Zahra Lari.

Presumably she was there to meet with Abu Dhabi authorities ahead of the 2019 Special Olympics World Games, to be held in the UAE capital in March of 2019.

And it brought back memories of that Michelle Kwan “standing story” I was always following, from about 1993 through 2006.

The outlines of it go like this.

Kwan, 13, was an alternate to the U.S. skating team for the celebrated 1994 competition at Lillehammer. She was to skate if Nancy Kerrigan — who had been injured in an attack by associates of Kerrigan rival Tonya Harding — were unable to compete.

Kerrigan went out on the ice, and Kwan went home, but with a taste of the Olympics.

By 1998, she was 17 and one of the planet’s elite skaters — and was favored to win gold at the Nagano Olympics.

I was in the press seating for the women’s long program, and I was partisan — I wanted her to win before she was a hometown story for me. But fellow American Tara Lipinsky, a jump-happy teen, skated boldly and Kwan was a bit subdued and a tiny bit unsteady, and Lipinski took the gold, somewhat controversially. (I thought Kwan had won.)

She was again favored to win gold, at the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002, when she was 23, but the biggest prize in figure skating again eluded her. She finished third, behind U.S. teen teammate Sarah Hughes, the gold-medal winner, and Russia’s Irina Slutskaya.

And by the time we got to Turin 2006, it seemed Kwan drama could not rise to the level of the previous two games, but it outstripped it.

She missed the nationals because of injury, was able to get the U.S. Figuring Skating to give her a private tryout, and she was added to the American team, ahead of Emily Hughes (Sarah’s sister).

When Kwan got to Turin, she went on to the ice and had a disastrous time of it; she was rusty, but she also apparently incurred a groin injury while on the ice. Her injury became a bigger problem through the night and she pulled out of the Games in the morning — which is just about the only story I remember from the Turin Games and the 17 days I spent in Italy.

So, she never got the gold medal, and I wrote a blog post about that in 2009, suggesting skate fans would always remember that lack of five-rings gold, given the importance of the Olympics to skaters.

It agitated some of her most devoted fans.

I still believe I had it right, though I take no pleasure in it.

Even last week, in the media release from the UAE, Kwan is identified as a “Olympic medalist” — which is listed ahead of her five world and nine U.S. championships.

By no means does it make her a sort of failure, but even Team Kwan seemed to prize Olympic gold above all else — prompting Michelle’s campaign to get a shot at Turin in 2006, as well as her maybe-I-will-come-back approach to the 2010 Vancouver Games, when she would have been chasing gold at age 29.

All those memories came rushing back this week, thanks to a couple of photographs from Abu Dhabi.