They were on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday, and Davis made plans to teach one of the anchors how to snowboard this weekend. They watched the women’s halfpipe finals Wednesday night, witnesses to Kaitlyn Farrington’s upset over Torah Bright, Kelly Clark and Hannah Teter. They went to a hockey game, then to the medal ceremony for the women and for the freestyle skiing slopestyle winners, all Americans.

“The next day, we were like, all right, it’s been 24 hours since we blew it,” Davis said. “We’re over it. Then Kaitlyn won, which is great, but we’re like, yeah, we fell. Then we were over it again, and we went to the medal ceremony. And it was like, yeah, we fell.”

By Friday, the feelings still came and went, swinging between disappointment and indifference. For months, they had treated the Olympics with ambivalence, saying it would be a great experience to go (Bretz was on the 2010 team, and finished 12th then, too), but not be a big deal if they did not. Then they went, and it all went worse than they expected, forcing an internal debate about how much it had really meant.

“I’ve been more disappointed in myself than I expected,” Davis said.

“It’s a terrible feeling,” Bretz said. “We rode so well all season.”

“You can’t let it get you too down,” Davis said. “It’s a ton of hype, but you can’t let it kill you. If this was any other year, I’d feel great about my season.”

“You’d feel like a pipe god,” Bretz said.

“This is probably my best year,” Davis said. “This is a blown-out-of-proportion contest. But I realize it’s blown out of proportion because it’s the one event that the American public knows. That and X Games. Those are the only events anybody asks me about: Oh, do you do X Games and the Olympics? No one ever asks if I do the Grand Prix.”

They were going to stay until the end of the Olympics, to take in the full experience. Now, weary of the constant reminders of their own disappointment, they plan to cut their trip short and head home to California. They want to get on their snowmobiles and go deep into the woods and snowboard in peace — “to get back to the reason we got into snowboarding,” Davis said.