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Well, good for Evgeny Plushenko. He’s proved all of his doubters wrong by winning Cup of Russia. So many figured he was joking when he talked about a comeback, because he’s talked about comebacks before and they never materialized. Even his own federation knew that it was a tall order for Plushenko to make it back - and they need him, because right now Russia is sorely lacking men’s stars.

And how could he come back after 3 1/2 years with a new crop of young, hungry skaters, skilled in the New Judging System, and drop the effects of the new lifestyle he has adopted since the Turin Olympics?

But Plushenko is really back, and landing the kind of big jumping tricks that we used to see in the old days (although missing is a quad-triple-triple, but we’ll forgive him that. He wouldn’t need it anyway.)

Since the Turin Olympics, men have been winning world championships without quads, like Jeffrey Buttle and Evan Lysacek. Now, knowing that Plushenko is back, will it put the hussle on for them to get at them again with renewed vigour?

I’ve got to hand it to the guy for his pluck. I’ve seen some of the older videos of him trying out his new Olympic programs, and not succeeding very well at all. And now he’s making people buzz.

But what I hope doesn’t happen is this: that he gets marks because he is an Olympic champion, because he always got high presentation marks, just because, whether he deserved them or not. Just because.

He got away with it in the early days of the new judging systems as judges were learning it and let’s leave it at that. He wasn’t known for his transitional footwork between moves. He would load up all of his big tricks at the beginning of his programs, got them out of the way when he was still fresh. It’s a lot harder to do big tricks at the end of a 4 1/2-minute routine, and that’s why the new judging system gives an extra 10 percent bonus for jumps completed in the second half. Plushenko didn’t have to try to place jumps at the end of a program, because he got such high marks, presentation and otherwise, that he didn’t need to.

What did I see on Saturday in Plushenko’s long program? A lot of front-loading again. The first minute of his tango routine was loaded up with trick after trick. In Saturday’s routine, he did three jumps after the second half, one right after the other, with little sign of choreography in between. The first one was a triple Lutz that was supposed to be part of a sequence with a triple Salchow, (although there were too many steps in between and he didn’t get credit for the sequence.) Admirable. The final jump was a simple double Axel.

In between the jumps, he spent way too much time on two feet, just pumping his way to the next trick. The marks he got for transitions - the moves that link elements - were wide-ranging.

One judge gave him a mark as low as 6.00 (out of 10) for his transitions. Well done. Another, a 6.25, another a 6.75. The highest mark he got for transitions was 7.75, and this from a judge who gave him rare marks of 9.00 for performance and interpretation. He was supposed to have been skating to a tango, but turn the music off and did that routine look like a tango? There were a couple of moves that looked as if he was with an imaginary dance partner, and then there was a pelvic thrust or two to sex it up. And when he landed his last three cluster of jumps, up went a finger, supposedly his statement that he was, still, No. 1 in the sport. But a tango? Why so many 9.0s for interpretation?

The highest and lowest marks are thrown out, so that 9.00 would head to the trash bin, but there were a couple of judges who gave him 9.00 for that non-tango-like routine.

The judges on the panel were from Lithuania, Ukraine, United States, Japan, France, Slovakia, Russia, Canada and Sweden.

Jeffrey Buttle is known as a skater who used the intricacies of the new judging system to the ultimate, especially when he won his world title in 2008 in Gothenburg, Sweden. In his long program, which he won, his average for transitions - and he was famous for his complex ones - was 7.75, while Plushenko’s average was 6.95. Methinks there should have been a larger difference in what I saw.

Buttle’s lowest mark was 7.50 for transitions in Sweden.

Buttle got 78.78 for program components in his long program at the 2008 world championships. At Cup of Russia on Saturday, Plushenko got 76.80. And the comforting thought is that at the 2008 world championships, Buttle won on the strength of his technical mark, not the presentation mark. There’s still hope yet. But would it have happened if Plushenko were in the field?

Still, Plushenko’s comeback is great fun. He adds to the chatter that will go on about the men’s event leading up to the Vancouver Olympics. And why have it any other way?

We won’t see Plushenko again in the Grand Prix Series. He’s been away for so long, the only Grand Prix he could do was in his home country. He won’t be at the Grand Prix Final. Aside from his national championships, we may see him only one more time before the Olympics, at the European championships in January. Perhaps by then, he will have added more transitions, and focus on interpretation. Perhaps in his first competition back in 3 1/2 years, he had to concentrate on the tricks, to get them down under pressure, and then comes the rest.

The suspense continues in the Plushenko comeback.