There's no medal good enough for some things.

Well, the 2010 Olympic games were overdone, as these things always are, and now they’re simply over, done. The para Olympics will continue on the sites for a while, of course, but most of the media, athletes and fans have moved on. We’ve pretty much worn ourselves out higher-further-fastering, and it’s time for a break. But it will all be happening again, bigger and badder, in 878 days. At that point the scene will be London, England, and we will have an opportunity to sit back and be nicer about their problems than their media were about ours. It’s Canadian, and, if we must have an overriding national trait, niceness is nice.

And, even though this whole business does bring out the Grinch in me, and without recanting anything I said in my last post, it does seem right, or maybe nice, to point out some of the good things that happened over the past few weeks in Vancouver. I don’t mean winning, swaggering, chest beating or muscle flexing, but those other human things that always happen when people get together to do anything and “the better angels of our nature” show up, along with all the rest. They happen in war zones and peaceful villages, playgrounds and parliaments, development projects and disasters. They are the good blown into our lives by the illest of winds.

• When a young Georgian athlete, Nodar Kumaritashvili, dies on the luge track, suddenly the national masks slip a little and we’re mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, in a loss that actually matters.

• When Joannie Rochette skates a bronze medal performance just a few days after her mother died, or Brian Burke manages the US hockey team to a silver medal two weeks after losing his son in a car accident, we realize that there’s just no flag raising, anthem singing, or medal awarding appropriate to that.

• And when a young singer, Nikki Yanofsky, has the grace and chutzpah, to sing O Canada as though it were a love song, or a figure skater, Johnny Weir, responds with grace and courage to nasty comments about his performance, there is something in us (that “better angel”) that rises up and reminds us that human nature can be beautiful, and perhaps even inspires us to be a little more beautiful a little more often.

• And there’s something inspiring, even in a hockey game, when you see the “bad guys” dig deep and battle back from a two goal deficit to tie the game with just 24 seconds to go. And then, of course, see the “good guys” battle back, after blowing the game, to win it in overtime. It’s enough to make you want to take all these medals out a get them bronzed. At times like these it’s really just fun to be here and human.

So, in the end, people got together and did some fun things in Vancouver. We won medals, set records, and even set records for winning medals. But the very best things we did are the sorts of things you don’t get a medal for. In fact, the really good things people do are so good that a medal would only be a distraction. These are the things that remind you that, though they’re used like nouns, athlete, winner, champion, medallist, are essentially adjectives. And human, though often an adjective, is essentially the noun. And sometimes it’s fun too.