MILAN – The “Quad God” crashed to earth with an icky thump.

How the heck did that happen?

“I blew it,” U.S. figure skater Ilia Malinin said Friday.

He not only failed to win gold that had been deemed a foregone conclusion, but tumbled off the medal stand and plummeted all the way to eighth place in the final standings.

“No way that just happened,” said Malinin, shocked to discover he was paralyzed by nerves, “that overwhelmed me … and I had no control.”

I’ve long insisted the loneliest moment in sports is when a figure skater stands at center ice with nowhere to hide, waiting for the music to cue the start of four pressure-packed minutes of jumps and spins.

Every eye in the arena fidgets with the anticipation of a parent at a kid’s piano recital, as spectators await a memory they hope will be golden but know very well it all could go straight to hell.

“Going into that starting pose, I just felt like all the traumatic moments in my life really started flooding my head,” Malinin admitted.

Before he even began to skate, Malinin was doomed.

Before the first move of his routine, he looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here, and exhaled with so much anxiety it hurt.

“So many negative thoughts went on from there,” Malinin said. “And I just did not handle it.”

The demons rattling around Malinin’s head opened the door to victory for 21-year-old Mikhail Shaidorov, whom nobody had on their bingo card. He’s from Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic with a population of 20 million that you’ll find on the globe by taking a left at Mongolia.

Shaidorov stood fifth after the short program. But after he skated free and flawlessly, all the medal favorites literally fell down in front of him.

Sitting on a chair next to the rink, when Shaidorov realized he would win no worse than bronze, “I was the happiest person in the world.”

When that bronze turned to silver, “my head exploded,” he said.

And after Malinin digested his poor score, then walked over to Shaidorov and offered a congratulatory hug to the new Olympic champion?

“Incredible,” Shaidorov said.

How do we begin to process the magnitude of this upset? 

This was Mike Tyson being knocked out by Buster Douglas.

This was Russian wrestling legend Alexander Karelin, unbeaten in 13 years of international competition, losing his final match at the 2000 Summer Games to a Wyoming cowboy named Rulon Gardner.

And it seems I’ve witnessed the oh-my-freaking-goodness astonishment in the eyes of Shaidorov somewhere before. Think it was the same happy disbelief that coach Jim Valvano wrapped himself in after his North Carolina State Wolfpack stunned Houston in the 1983 Final Four.

As the upset unfolded, I sat in the arena’s lower bowl alongside a journalist from Kazakhstan, who looked at me for confirmation by asking: “Is this real?”

Told it was OK to believe his eyes, the stunned reporter cupped his head in his hands just before his face fell into his laptop, where he wept tears of pride and joy for his homeland.

“It’s not like any other competitions,” Malinin said. “It’s the Olympics.”

Proclaiming himself the “Quad God” in honor of making jumps with four turns above the ice so effortlessly to appear ho-hum, Malinin had not lost a figure skating competition since 2023, back when he was 18 years old.

With the disdain for gravity of a young “Air Jordan” and the arrogance of Ali in his boxing prime, Malinin came to the Olympics with the expressed purpose of not only winning, but boldly taking his sport where no figure skater had ever gone before.

He skates while his recorded voice provides narration alongside the music to his long program. Sounding like Captain Kirk, he proclaims: “Begin, where light no longer reaches, where no path has yet been made.”

Malinin didn’t just stumble over his own hype.

He crashed in slow motion.

And the confusion on his face was so intense it burned.

“The noise is a lot to handle,” Malinin admitted, as if realizing it for the first time.

Being crowned Olympic champion in advance created a buzz that came back to bite him.

His hard fall at age 21 reminds us, as Malinin learned the hard way, that “social media has its ups and it really has its downs.”

Legends cannot be made from clickbait.

Bonus points aren’t awarded for brand strength.

Malinin’s brand now?

The “Quad God” is an Olympic fraud.

After falling with an icky thump, only Malinin can pick himself up and rewrite that story.