By Christine Brennan

USA TODAY Sports columnist

BOSTON – Comebacks in sports are usually reserved for the old, the grizzled veterans and the has-beens who have been all but forgotten. They are not expected to be the task of young 20-something siblings who are still taking classes at the University of Michigan, athletes who have been hiding in plain sight ever since 2011, when they burst onto the international ice dancing scene with a surprising world championship bronze medal.

It has been five long years since Maia and Alex Shibutani stepped onto that podium at the world figure skating championships, the freshest American faces in what has become the nation’s most successful skating discipline.

On Thursday night at the 2016 world championships, they returned, half a decade older and wiser, now savvy veterans of the sequin wars, having the delightful climb up one more step as the new world silver medalists at the halfway point of the four-year Winter Olympic cycle.

“We’ve had an interesting journey but at the same time we know we have grown so much,” Maia said. Sitting next to her, older brother Alex chimed in, “We never thought there would be such a gap. But we put one foot in front of the other and just kept making steady progress.”

The Shibutanis, the reigning U.S. national champions who train at the Arctic Edge Ice Arena in Canton, are believed to be the first ice dance team in history to endure a five-year wait between winning world medals. Five years is a lifetime in figure skating. Many careers, especially in women’s skating, never last that long.

Yet here are the ShibSibs, as they are known on Twitter, who were joined by their former Canton training partners Madison Chock and Evan Bates, the new world bronze medalists – only the third time in history that Americans have won two dance medals at the same worlds (1966 and 2011 were the others).

The French team of Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron, the reigning world champions, successfully defended their title with an avant-garde free dance and finished with 194.46 points. The Shibutanis received 188.43 points, followed by Chock and Bates with 185.77.

American teams have now won world ice dancing medals in 10 of the last 12 years. These two are the latest, and will likely be the nation’s top hopes heading into the 2018 Olympic Games in South Korea.

“I think this says that U.S. ice dance is very strong, the field is so deep and there are just so many good skaters,” Chock said.

And to think ice dancing once was regarded as such a lost cause for American teams, with the results so predetermined by an antiquated and corrupt judging system, that most U.S. journalists covering an international skating competition decided it was the best time to take a dinner break.

That’s definitely not happening anymore. Writers would rather go hungry than miss this.

The Shibutanis are a particularly noteworthy breath of fresh air in their sport. Their free dance to Coldplay’s “Fix You” became a crowd-pleasing hit this season, setting a new standard for their performances to come.

“Our career has definitely been unique,” Alex said, “but I wouldn’t change anything. What we went through got us to this moment….The ice dance field has never been stronger, never been more competitive. Our material this year really suited us. We’re going to continue on the trend we discovered. We’ve really taken our skating to another level.”