''There are a lot of questionables right now," says Parsons, who'll be back in the area Sunday afternoon when her teammates take on the Hockey East All-Stars in Durham, N.H. ''So I'm just taking it as it comes."

Just because Parsons has a gold medal from the World Championships, just because she scored the squad's last two goals against archrival Canada, doesn't mean she can start packing for Turin.  Too many crazy things can happen. Like mononucleosis, which kept Parsons out of action for a couple of weeks last month.

''When I was in Saskatoon [in October], I felt really tired, so I thought I had a cold," she says. ''Then I thought I had the flu. Then I thought, I'm just run down and sick. Then we all had blood tests and some of my results came back weird."

Hockey is a slippery sport played during the season of sneezes and sniffles, so Parsons is taking nothing for granted. So her attitude is the same as it was at this time last year, when she was trying out for the World Championships squad.

''You try really hard not to think about it because you don't want to get ahead of yourself," she says.  Getting ahead of herself has been the secret of Parsons's rapid climb up the elite ladder. She made the US under-22 team at 16. She made the world squad at 17. Now she's the youngest member of the team by nearly two years, playing alongside women who are old enough to be her aunt, if not her mother.

Parsons is the poster girl for the Cammi Generation, the legion of starry-eyed, slapshooting 10-year-olds who watched Cammi Granato and her teammates win the 1998 Olympic gold medal in the inaugural women's tournament in Nagano. So who was Parsons's role model? ''Cammi," she says. ''Like every other kid."

Two years ago, Parsons found herself dressing next to her idol at a tryout camp.  ''She was being quiet," recalls Granato. ''So I said, 'You know, it's OK to talk to an old person. We're not that boring. We're fun.' And she laughed."