Maple Leaf Cool? Get Used to It, Please

VANCOUVER – The Vancouver Winter Olympics ended with fireworks and festivity, the city and nation exuberant at its tally of gold medals, with the most glorious coming when Sid "The Kid" Crosby fulfilled Canada's fondest Olympic wish -- and national mythology -- by scoring in overtime against a dangerous and talented Team USA to win men's Olympic hockey gold on Canadian ice for the first time ever.

The joyful heat of that moment and those Games still ripple through the March sunlight of this stunningly beautiful city, the cherry blossom trees a brilliant pink against the Pacific blue sky to make it seem as if Mother Nature herself, so ornery at the outset of these Winter Olympics, was pleased with the outcome, for the Olympic love fest (modest and polite) of course, continues.

The Paralympic flame has reached Vancouver, and those games kick off with a cauldron-lighting party in the city center on Thursday evening, featuring gold medal goalie Roberto Luongo, followed by Friday night's opening ceremony at BC Place, boasting a cast of 5,000. Games on, once again.

The posters quoting from Canada's national anthem in English and French bask everywhere: "With Glowing Hearts/Des Plus Brillants Exploits" they read, but not so long ago, they seemed like vainglorious fantasy.

These Winter Olympics began darkly, with mourning hearts (though not enough from the IOC) when Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed in a practice run just hours before the games officially began. After that tragedy, the mechanical malfunction of one of the torch cauldron legs at the opening ceremony, and the rampaging mob of anarchists the day after, seemed like mere punctuation to a doom foretold.

Even Canada's stated Olympic goal to "Own the Podium" by winning the most medals of any country seemed like a surprisingly uncharacteristic taunting of the gods, and when Canadian athletes crashed on the slopes and finished out of the medals in the games' early days, the country, so adaptable to harsh reality, added a couple of consonants to take care of this new disappointment. And so, "Blown the Podium" was born as a national slogan.

But then, as it always has, the country shook off these body blows to its identity, and came out skating hard, ending up winning the most gold medals of any country at a single winter games in Olympic history. Skier Alexandre Bilodeau put to rest the national angst by winning Canada's first home gold medal on Day 3. Joannie Rochette showed Canadian heart, albeit a broken one, as she skated to a figure skating bronze after the sudden death of her mother. Then the men's hockey team pulled gold out of sudden death themselves, sending joy running through the streets of Vancouver, which the anarchists had recently vandalized in hopes of ...well, their goal still isn't clear. And so, encomiums rose on the page and in the ether instead of the predicted bitter eulogies.

But the praises that mattered most to Canadians, as they always have, came from our kin in the USA, for "Children of a Common Mother" is what the inscription reads on the monumental Peace Arch border crossing from Washington State into British Columbia, and we always care what our elder siblings think about us, sometimes too much.

Even now, people still quote what NBC journalist Brian Williams said in his thank you to Canada after the games ended (ironic note, Canada has a celebrated TV journalist named Brian Williams, too). "Thank you, Canada...for reminding some of us we used to be a more civil society," he said, and it struck a chord with Canadians. Civility for us is both a point of pride and a necessary means of self-protection in a country with two official languages and 30-very-odd million people spread across a landmass larger than Russia.

"Nobody's going to shoot you if you're playing street hockey with them," said Karen Powell, a Vancouver film producer, referring to the cops from police forces across Canada who provided Olympic security for the games -- and saw it as their duty to play spontaneous road hockey with fans.

And those roads were clear because the streets that hadn't been closed were benefiting from Vancouverites' heeding the plea to take public transit. Even now it can be seen on electronic billboards along arterial routes into the city, with a typically Canadian "Please" and "Thank you" bookending the directive.

"One of the biggest legacies of the games to this city is that it got people out of their cars and onto buses and the SkyTrain," said Lori Williams, a Vancouver lawyer and environmentalist. "They promised us a green Olympics, the greenest yet, and people pitched in to make that happen, and fingers crossed, it's continuing."

Green yes, but red and white at its heart. "The biggest thing these Olympics have done," said Powell, "is to finally distinguish us from the Americans, both to ourselves, and to them. We're much more than moose and beaver and street hockey, but hey, if they think moose and beaver and street hockey are cool, then that's a good thing."