After their skate, the answer is yes

It wasn't part of their routine, and Rena Inoue was puzzled.

She and John Baldwin were taking their bows last Saturday after their finale at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, waving to the crowd as they had done hundreds of times.

But when she turned to face another section of St. Paul's Xcel Energy Center, Baldwin wasn't beside her.

He was down on one knee, reaching for her hands.

"I thought at first he was tired or something," Inoue said. "I was looking at him like, 'What's going on?' "

Baldwin, her pairs partner since they clicked during a tryout at Paramount Iceland in 2000 and romantic interest the last six years, was asking her to marry him.

He didn't have a ring to dazzle her.

He had only the certainty that came to him that morning, that this was the moment to publicly declare his love for the woman who saved his career and illuminated his life.

"I just felt in my heart we were going to skate really well and we did, and I was going to take advantage of this opportunity," he said.

"Mostly, I don't want anyone else to get Rena. I found somebody that I really respect and love being with. It's so lucky that I found somebody like that."

And so the strapping, blond Baldwin, a son of Southern California, pledged his devotion to Inoue, a native of Hyougo, Japan, so fragile-looking at 4 feet 11 and 95 pounds yet strong enough to have conquered lung cancer 10 years ago.

Inoue, who is a fan of the Peanuts comic strip and thinks of herself as Woodstock to Baldwin's Snoopy, said yes.

First, she shed a few tears.

"I was thinking of what I went through, of course," she said this week, wearing a Peanuts sweat shirt in their Santa Monica home.

"This was our eighth nationals together, and when he proposed he told me how important I am in his life and everything. All of a sudden, everything we went through the last 7 1/2 years together, it got me, and that's why I started crying.

"We share not just so many good times but also bad things and anger. We share everything, happy or not. And we are still together, still competing. It's just amazing."

It's more than that.

"It's like a miracle," Baldwin said.

It doesn't matter that they finished second to Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker and didn't add to the U.S. titles they won in 2004 and in 2006.