Winter Olympics

O Canada, did it ever fill the arena, everyone singing, players with their thick arms draped around one another, fans weeping into their giant red jerseys, surely one of the loudest anthems ever. You know what? Let Canada sing. It earned it. It needed it. The joy, the relief, the redemption, and, of course, the farewell. On the final day of Canada's official duties as Olympic hosts, its national sport survived America's national grit Sunday, winning the gold-medal hockey game over the United States in overtime, 3-2, in front of a bouncing sea of braying red. The winners celebrated with the game's best ice dancing, nearly two dozen men locked in a jumping, board-rattling embrace.

Their game, their gold, but the Olympic hockey finale between Canada and the U.S. belonged to history before the roars triggered by Sidney Crosby's overtime goal had faded by so much as a decibel Sunday. Crosby, whose silence the previous two games had led a nation to brood, took a pass from Jarome Iginla and rifled a shot through the legs of U.S. goaltender Ryan Miller 7 minutes 40 seconds into overtime, giving Canada a 3-2 victory in the last event of perhaps the last Olympic tournament that will include NHL players.

According to the Nielsen ratings released by NBC on Monday afternoon, 190 million people watched some part of the Vancouver Olympics on the various networks of NBC, making it the second-most-watched Winter Games. The Games surpassed the 2002 Salt Lake City Games but trailed the 1994 Lillehammer Games, which were highlighted by the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan controversy. The Lillehammer Olympics had 204 million viewers; the Salt Lake City Olympics had 187 million. In Canada, CTV reported that 22 million people, about two-thirds of the Canadian population, watched as the Canadian Olympic hockey team defeated the United States for the gold medal Sunday.

So I'm at this club with Pamela Anderson. Never in a million years would I think I'd ever write those words. Sure, I'm ashamed, but confession is good for the soul -- assuming I still have one. At the club -- "Sanafir," it's called -- they have large booths that are like hard padded beds, no tables or chairs, upon which everyone sits around uncomfortably and tries to eat or drink without spilling. It's supposed to be novel, I guess, but as with all things that try too hard to be different, it instead turns out silly.

Steve Holcomb said no one would care if he didn't win the four-man bobsled competition to end a 62-year-old U.S. drought. For the first time all week, the world's best bobsled driver this season was completely wrong. The reigning world champion and overall World Cup winner added Olympic gold to his list of accomplishments Saturday with a decisive win against a field that included the most decorated man in bobsled history and the driver with the most runs on the Whistler track.

When speedskaters Brian Hansen, Jonathan Kuck and Chad Hedrick finished the team pursuit "A" final early Saturday afternoon, they could pat themselves on the back for winning a silver medal and officially start the U.S. chest-thumping for making history. Theirs was the 35th medal for Team USA in the 2010 Winter Olympics, one more than its record 34 at Salt Lake City in 2002. Steve Holcomb's four-man bobsled team added another later Saturday, the first U.S. gold in the sport since 1948.

It was after midnight, a week ago, the U.S. had earlier defeated Canada in a preliminary-round Olympic hockey game, the emptying streets wet, the mood soggy. I was returning from our nightly visit to the giant four-pronged Olympic flame with my 15-year-old daughter, Mary Clare, who was wearing an American flag like a cape, and a smile like a necklace. It was one of the first times she wore something that didn't represent her high school or favorite sports team. It was one of the first moments she may have realized the pride in being an American.

Day after painful day, the failures have been piling up: The Russians couldn't catch any Olympic gold in figure skating, fumbled the early biathlon races and, most crushing of all, got trounced at ice hockey. And, for once, this country of stoical nationalism and deep, black humor is showing signs of rage and a rare flash of public humility. From the penniless to the powerful, Russians lashed out against officials this week over the country's performance in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics with a vitriol seldom seen, even amid pervasive graft and lawlessness.

The water cooler has been replaced. We are standing around Twitter, deconstructing figure skater Evan Lysacek's long program, debating whether Evgeni Plushenko's quadruple jump was undervalued. We are gathering on Facebook pages to bad-mouth NBC for its love of tape-delayed sports or to be one among thousands of instant style critics: What were they thinking with those women's bobsled suits? How does Bob Costas get that hair color? How do I get Shaun White's tomato red? In the last six weeks, Americans have watched and talked about big sports events in numbers that have achieved record levels for television as well as online, including social media -- from the Super Bowl to Tiger Woods' public mea culpa and now the Winter Olympics.

Curling tops my list of what I respectfully refer to as "Dumb Winter Sports." To this list, I would include almost everything except skiing, snowboarding and hockey, which are merely "Insane Winter Sports." People call to ask what it's like up here, and I tell them that it's like summer camp in the snow -- for the dumb and the insane. You should hear them sigh enviously on the other end of the phone line. Yet, curling leads the dumb list. As you probably know, the Scots invented it some 500 years ago, and probably what's most amazing is not that it has survived over the centuries but that they ever played it a second time.