Vancouver, BC (Sportsbooks) - It was Vancouver, then Vonncouver, then even Vancuso for a while, I think. But mostly it was rainy. And mild. It was kind of like having the Winter Olympics in Seattle, only with not as much flannel.
Unless you count the pattern on the American snowboard uniforms.
What started out tragically as an Olympics defined by the death of an athlete, Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, ended as an Olympics defined by Canada's gold medal in men's hockey.
And if you don't believe that, then you didn't see the ninety-year-old grandmother sitting in her wheelchair on the curb, waiving a Canadian flag at the honking traffic. You weren't on Robson Street six hours after the overtime win against the United States, the only Yankee idiot who dared walk into the belly of the beast that late.
The hockey win gave Canada a Winter Olympics-record 14 gold medals in Vancouver. The silver won by the U.S. also set a record: Americans won 37 medals here, more than any country ever has before at the Winter Games.
It was a good 16 days for North America. (What about Mexico, you say? Well, they had Hubertus von Hohenlohe, the 51-year-old alpine skier who is descended from German royalty. He's also a photographer. And a businessman. And a pop singer called "Andy Himalaya." All true.)
About that medal count: It was being tallied everywhere here. On the way to Cypress Mountain there was even a billboard on the front lawn of a private residence that was keeping track. Only problem: They hadn't updated it. The counter said 001 and Canada had won its second medal earlier in the day, a bronze by Kristina Groves in the women's 3,000-meter speedskating race.
Also about that counter: There were three spots for numbers. Three spots? Really optimistic considering no one's ever won more Winter Olympics medals than the 37 the Americans captured here.
The counter was also wrong at Yaletown Brewing Co. last Monday night. It hadn't updated to include the gold medal won by Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in ice dance.
Which was surprising, since the one thing you can be sure of is that Canadians love their gold medals. After each one of them, the Heritage Horn on top of the main press center -- that building with sails for a roof -- played the opening four bars of "O Canada."
At 115 decibels.
It's how Vancouverites know when it's lunchtime. No kidding.
We didn't hear much about the medal count until the Canadians started winning golds. But once they started, ooh boy, you couldn't get away from it. Even the volunteers got in on the act.
Suddenly, the front page of a major city paper read: "CANADA LEADS THE GAMES IN GOLD."
It was certainly an accomplishment. Before Alexandre Bilodeau won the men's moguls on Feb. 14, Canada had never captured an Olympic gold medal on home soil. The celebration that night had been building since Montreal in 1976. It was carried over from Calgary in 1988.
"Our kids are crying they're so excited," one woman, Suzanne Rose, 36, of Quilchena, British Columbia, told me.
Another woman walking to her bus that night screamed into her phone: "Dude, we won gold! And I was there!"
The Olympics were held in a big city again, and it looks like that's mostly how it will be from now on. The Summer and Winter Games have just become too big. One thing you miss: The kind of intimacy you get from a place like Lillehammer, Norway, which Olympic writers are always talking about. One thing you gain: Paragraphs like these next two.
One night British Columbia turned, well, downright British when particularly daft fellow whistling the "Superman" theme smacked us in the face with a wet British flag. He was wearing it like a cape and sprinting down the sidewalk near the trendy Yaletown neighborhood.
That was also the night Canada beat Slovakia to reach the gold medal hockey game and we saw two men wearing orange traffic drums making their way across the street.
These weren't a particularly well-run Games -- a broken ice machine in Canada? -- but that doesn't always matter. From a media perspective, when the shuttles were late, they weren't very late. But then again, they were late all the way to the last day.
"We've had two weeks to do it," a supervisor said one night. "We'll get it right by the 28th."
He said that as our bus left (on time) at midnight, as the calendar turned from Feb. 25th to Feb. 26th. The bus left on time, but we were stuck in at one intersection for more than 10 minutes when the traffic police refused to stop pedestrians from crossing Robson Street.
Their city, their Olympics. Nothing you can do about that.
The second-strangest thing I saw while I was here: The feeding frenzy in the British press over the early mistakes the Vancouver organizing committee made. They have opened England up for a bloodletting in two years when London hosts the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The strangest thing: I watched American aerials skier Jeret Peterson do "The Hurricane" and win a silver medal, then two days later was pondering the chance of a tsunami warning. That was weird.
Also, one night on the shuttle back to the hotel we saw a Russian carrying a Snuggie. That was weird, too.
Getting ready for Sochi in 2014, no doubt, where he might actually need a warm blanket.
