‘94 WINTER OLYMPICS / Lillehammer : NOTEBOOK

Everybody loves a winner, as the Canadian hockey team is discovering.

Players are being deluged by letters, some from people they haven’t heard from in years.

Dwayne Norris has received mail from officials of the minor league hockey association he played for in St. John’s, Newfoundland; Paul Kariya from his high school teachers in Vancouver, and the entire team has been getting congratulations from NHL players and executives.

“Wayne Gretzky has been writing us, all the NHL teams have been writing us,” Kariya said. “We really don’t have a sense of it here, but I guess everybody in Canada has been really going nuts.”

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After three weeks away from home, only a few things can inspire tired journalists to move fast. One of them is the prospect of free clothing. Specifically, free underwear. And in this land of the exorbitant laundry bill, clean underwear.

In a mass migration bigger than any procession of moose, journalists rushed to the parking lot outside the main media center Saturday afternoon when an underwear manufacturer’s truck pulled up and distributed samples.

Smiling as broadly as any of the gold-medal winners here, the newsmen and women returned, clutching packages of clean, white undies.

Said one photographer, “I’d kiss you if you were giving out socks.”