Left missing the five-ring distraction

A week ago I was having a last slice of toast in my favorite Ham-'n'-Egger in Salt Lake City. Elizabeth, my waitress, tipped coffee into my cup. "You're all leaving," she said adjusting her glasses on her nose and looking around. "It's over and it's sad. It's like the end of Christmas."

Yes, except that a week after Christmas we get New Year's. And when the whole holiday season ends, we know we only have to wait 'til next year and they'll come around again.

There'll be no Salt Lake City Olympics next year, or the year after that, or, in all likelihood, ever again in most of our lifetimes. Maybe that's why it has been so hard to let it go.

It didn't seem as if it could ever end. Not even at the closing ceremonies when the sight of Kristi Yamaguchi and Katarina Witt skate-dancing to Kiss surely augured the end of culture as we have known it.

Now, the Olympics linger: Sarah Hughes' hometown parade is scheduled for Sunday, skier Johnny Mosely's on our Raisin Bran boxes, doping scandals are still emerging. Yet the party itself is done. For three weeks we were able to count medals instead of true international crises. We had speed skaters, instead of soldiers, on our front pages.

Each of us experienced our own Olympics -- whether you endured the prime-time jingoism of NBC, or tuned in to the network's cable cousins during the afternoon, or were lucky enough, as I was, to have been there. We all have our set of lasting memories that go beyond Salé and Pelletier's pairs skate, beyond Canada's hockey gold, beyond Ohno's spills and Kostelic's thrills.

I think back to Salt Lake and remember the happy yokels who sat on the scoop-end of garden shovels, slid down hills near Park City and at the bottom explained why shovel sledding -- cheap and easy to get a handle on -- deserved to be an Olympic sport.

I think back on bobsled brakeman Vonetta Flowers, the first African-American to win gold at the Winter Olympics. Even before she won, she won. When bobsled favorite Jean Racine called Flowers a couple of days before the event and tried to coax her to ditch driver Jill Bakken and come ride with her, Flowers told Racine to buzz off. Flowers was loyal. She made the most significant history of the Games. She wept silent tears on the medal stand. For all that, she's my favorite Olympian.