Athens did it! No, the Games weren’t perfect. None ever are, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d say the hosts didn’t do their jobs.

There were two major concerns going in: security and doubts that the venues and infrastructure would be ready in time. On both scores, the local organizers did so well that once things got started, the focus was where it should be, on the athletes.

Whatever occasional controversies that occurred on the fields, courts, and mats are not to be laid at the feet of the hosts, but at the sports' governing bodies, such as in gymnastics, where the judging controversy involving American Paul Hamm still hasn’t been handled to everyone’s satisfaction.

When all was said and done, overall attendance in Athens was respectable if hardly spectacular the way it was four years earlier in Sydney. Of course, selling 5 million tickets is a tall order anywhere.

Early on, some venues in Athens looked half empty or worse. In particular, I remember watching a preliminary rowing event where the boats passed long stretches of empty stands before reaching the finish area, where, thankfully, a decent number of appreciative fans waited.

Surely, in a country with a population of only 11 million people, it wasn’t realistic to expect consistently large local turnouts across the board.

The potential for spectacular crowds looks good for Beijing in 2008. Not only is China the world’s most populated country with 1.3 billion people, but Beijing’s population is almost equal to that of all of Greece. The key, it would seem, is to keep ticket prices affordable. Charge too much, as occurred for some events in Athens, and the Chinese will be forced to stay home.

• One of the most appealing aspects about the Olympics is the absence of commercial signage at the competition sites. It was refreshing, given what has happened in American professional sports, not to be bombarded with virtual or actual billboards for all manner of products. Instead, a classically beautiful olive wreath motif was stamped on many of the playing surfaces, and when seen from overheard it made an elegant visual statement.

• Given all the diving I saw on NBC’s nightly Olympics coverage, I kept hoping someone would explain why the divers shower off on the pool deck after each dive. My only guess is that they want to rinse off the chlorinated pool water.

• Where else but in gymnastics is the act of standing on two feet such a desireable goal. Stick a landing, and you may be in medal contention. Take a step or short hop, and you may go home empty-handed.

• I can understand why major-league baseball doesn’t want to disrupt its season to send players to the Olympics, but its resistance to doing so practically invites Olympic officials to dump it. Even if baseball can live with this, the sport really needs to think about how it can grow the game internationally, especially among children in cities where building and maintaining large urban parks is challenging.

Yes, baseball has a sizable international following, but it can do more to be socially responsive. Maybe, then, it should consider doing something really radical, namely promoting Wiffle Ball. It’s a backyard-type of game that fits well in a compact space, is inexpensive, and is a lot of fun to play with few players (no more than five on a side). The game has its own rules, and has the potential to be more of a life-time sport than either baseball or softball.

• Consider this: The US men’s basketball team, which is supported by an incredible feeder network of high-powered college and pro teams, came away from Athens with a bronze medal. The men’s gymnastics team, which is basically invisible on the American sports landscape between Olympics, walks away with a silver medal. Go figure.

There’s an interesting irony here, too, in that the number of men’s college gymnastics programs has shrunk drastically over the past five years, from 200 to just 21. One of the programs dropped was at UCLA, which accounted for half the members of the 1984 gold-medal-winning Olympic team.

So what’s going on? Basically, gymnastics has moved away from a collegiate model to more of a European, club style of development. The result is tremendous efficiency in producing elite, world-class athletes from small talent pools.

• You’ve got to love the tradition, maintained in weightlifting, wrestling, and perhaps other sports, that calls for athletes to place their unlaced shoes at the scene of their final competitions. In Athens, two athletes in particular left memorable images in honoring this tradition: Greek weightlifter Pyros Dimas and American wrestler Rulon Gardner.

Both were poignant moments, made more so by the special place each athlete has carved out at the Olympics. Dimas, an Albanian-born ethnic Greek, was trying to win his fourth gold medal. And although he came up short (with the bronze), once he took off his shoes a love-in with the Greek fans began. They cheered, sang, and chanted for him for 5 minutes during the awards ceremony.

Gardner is the barrel-chested Greco Roman wrestler from Wyoming who won gold in Sydney with one of the most dramatic upsets in Games history (ending Russian Alexander Karelin’s 13-year unbeaten streak). The four years since then have had their seriously challenging moments, including a snowmobile adventure that went awry and led to life-threatening winter exposure and the breakup of his first marriage. Gardner came back and tried valiantly for an encore. After losing in the semis, he regrouped and won the bronze, walking away, shoeless, from the mat one final time, his cheeks dripping tears.

• While watching the men’s pole vaulting it occurred to me that, from an athlete’s standpoint, the event may offer the best single second in sports. That’s about how long the free fall lasts after a vaulter clears the bar. The way down must be total exhilaration, or, as in the case of American Toby “Crash” Stevenson, the men’s silver medallist, an opportunity for mid-air celebration.

• Atlhough my personal spectatating preference is to watch six-player, indoor volleyball, I’m amazed that the beach game works so well on such a large court with only two players per side. The dimensions of the courts just aren’t that much different. The indoor court measures 9 meters x 18 meters; the beach court 8 meters x 16 meters. In other words, the beach court is only about 20 percent smaller. But even with sand underfoot, Olympic-caliber players are quick enough and anticipate so well that they manage to cover a lot of the court and have good rallies.

I couldn’t agree more with Boston Globe sports columnist Bob Ryan, who says that the days of treating the US Olympic basketball players like royalty should end. No more putting up the players on the Queen Mary (as in Athens) or in some luxury hotel. Pick only players who are willing to be “true Olympians” and stay in the athletes’ village. Just make sure the rooms have extra long beds.

At the Olympics, writers too rise to the occasion. I’d give a gold to Bill Goodykoontz of The Arizona Republic for his description of team handball, a mysterious sport, at least for Americans. Here’s what he wrote: “[I]t’s a mad seven-on-seven scramble with what looks like one of those balls you pull out of the closet every six or seven years and wonder what it’s for. … It looks, in fact, like something your fourth-grade P.E. teacher might have dreamed up in the cafeteria one day when it was raining outside.” Congratulations, Bill, you nailed it.

Another line I liked a lot was that George Vecsey of The New York Times used to describe Mia Hamm, the long-time star of the US women’s soccer team, which recaptured the gold in Athens.

In describing how Hamm has always pushed away from the cult of sports personality stardom, he wrote “She always acted as part of society, not a celebrity face on a T-shirt.” Having once interviewed Hamm when only a precocious teenager on the US squad and later seen her still unaffected by world stardom at the ’96 Olympics, I’d say Vecsey has sized up this modest and down-to-earth superstar very well.

• The European fans have a proper appreciation and understanding of track and field (called simply “athletics” in Olympic parlance), which is one of the reasons that the Athens’ Olympic stadium was such a supercharged place.

• For track and field to make a comeback in the US, some sort of Little League may be needed. As a model, I suggest something I’ve admired in my hometown of Needham, Mass. It’s low-key, fun-focused program that introduces children to running, jumping, hurdling, and throwing in an encouraging environment in which everybody earns ribbons and is rewarded with Popsicles at the end of the evening. Disney might make a terrific lead sponsor for such a program.

• It was nice to see some of the biggest stars of the Games, including swimmer Michael Phelps, who won eight medals, at the closing ceremony. Phelps was there even though the swimming competition ended a week earlier and he had to catch a flight a few hours later. And what, a TV interviewer wondered, did he want to do when he got home? Sleep, he said.

• Although NBC focused its attention on interviewing medal-winning Americans, the network interviewed athletes from enough other countries to leave one overriding impression: English truly is a universal language. The command of the English language by athletes of so many nationalities was truly impressive, especially to a monolingual American. And speaking of those TV interviews, NBC managed to get most of the track athletes on camera while they were winded but intelligible, lending a nice sense of immediacy.

• The Bush administration miscalculated the backlash to even its mild politicalization of the Olympics. A campaign ad that made a connection between American foreign policy and the presence of “two more free nations” (Iraq and Aghanistan) at the Games drew fire from various quarters, including from Iraq’s Olympic boss as well as the US Olympic Committee, who said the ad violated the organization’s right to manage Olympic trademarks and images in the United States.

• Gymnastics judges clearly were their own worst enemies at these Olympics, where they managed to miscalculate the starting value (the mathematical baseline) for scoring routines on a few occasions, including in the disputed men’s all-around competition, won by American Paul Hamm.

Even if you believe the scoring should stand as is, a case can be made that two gold medals – one to Hamm and the other to South Korea’s Yang Tae-young – should have been awarded. After all, Hamm won by 12 thousandths of a point in the closest Olympic finish ever in the event.

In a sport where judgments, not cut-and-dried measures like times or distances, determine the outcome, surely there’s a point where two scores are so close they should be declared a tie. And this seems one of them. Hairs should only be split so far, and there’s certainly no reason that duplicate medals can’t be awarded regularly when there is such negligible difference in the scores of two competitors.

Just spell out the rules clearly and everything should be OK.

I’m still scratching my head over how I could be a nightly viewer of NBC’s Olympic coverage and not see more than a short review of US women’s softball action, while being served a steady diet of women’s beach volleyball (I've seen enough of Misty May and Kerri Walsh to be their coach).

The American softball players put on a performance for the ages, giving up just one run in nine games and outscoring the opposition 51-1. That lone run, by the way, came in the gold medal game against Australia, which the US won 5-1 for its third Olympic championship in three tries. US dominance in softball is reminiscent of that enjoyed by the American men’s basketball team through the 1960s.

The women’s softball squad is probably the closest thing the Olympics have to a Dream Team at this point – even more overpowering than the women’s impressive basketball contingent.

In some ways, the softball players may be a little too good, especially in the pitching department. Hardly anybody seems able to make consistent contact against the windmilling American hurlers, whose pitches must look like BBs hurtling toward the plate.

If baseball, as the saying goes, is 90 percent pitching, then high-level fastpitch women's softball must be about 95 percent pitching. In fact, if I could change one thing about the game, I’d move the pitching rubber back seven feet from its current distance of 43 feet, which still seems a little too close to home plate for comfort. Sensing the need to adjust the pitching distance, three more feet were tacked on before the Olympics (and the outfield fences moved back from 200 feet to 220 feet).

The dimensions are moving in the right direction, but more tweaking – possibly including with the size and liveliness of the ball – might further enhance the game. Of course, the women on this year’s Olympic team would say the dimensions are perfect and that with the proper training, hitters can see blazing underhanded deliveries plenty good enough. The team benefited from some innovative ocular training before the Olympics. Batters practiced using a cannon that fired tennis balls at 150 m.p.h. Not only that but they homed in on identifying the color of the ink on the ball and what number was printed on it. At first, this seemed an impossibility, but through repetition the players learned to mentally slow down the ball. “When you see that big red five flying right at you, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is cool.'"

• I tip my hat to Michael Phelps, a phenomenal swimmer, who richly deserved those eight medals (including six gold) he won. It almost seems though, that swimming has too many events that call on the same general skill set. Yes, there are races for different strokes (back, breast, butterfly, and freestyle) and racing distances, but good swimmers enjoy more multiple–medal opportunities than athletes in most other Olympic sports.

• One fact that really struck me during my years covering the Olympics is how reporters work different “shifts” depending on where they’re from. This became quite apparent at the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo, where I shared a two-room suite with a British journalist. We were there for nearly three weeks and never saw each other. The only reason I knew he was a Brit was from the English toothpaste and shaving supplies he left in our common bathroom. The same sort of situation occurred again in Calgary in 1988, when I heard but never saw the German journalists in the room right next to mine.

• When you watch the Olympics you’re reminded of what real reality TV is all about. The feeling and emotion are genuine, not manipulated. Although not written for the Olympics, the famous introduction from ABC’s long-running Wide World of Sports is appropos: The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat…the human drama of athletic competition….”

• Where would we be in our understanding of the ancient Olympics without all those wonderfully preserved Greek vases? The artisans who crafted them were the sports photographers of their day.

• You can usually count on a few new wrinkles in the television coverage of the Olympics These Games have been no different. One I’ve enjoyed is SimulCam replay technology that shows two people doing the same dive side by side. This allows the analyst to point out the differences in execution and artistry that account for different scores. So what else should TV consider in the future? Maybe a mobile camera suspended over the swimmers. It shouldn’t be too hard to set up and it would put viewers even more in the race than the coverage already does.

• One of the funny little moments early in the Games occurred during a medals-award ceremony, when a couple of swimmers, unsure of the protocol, appeared to ask each other if they should leave their olive wreaths on or take them off during the playing of the national anthem. Word apparently got around that keeping them on was OK.

• It’s a good thing the Olympics move around, because the variety of backdrops generate their own special memories. In Athens, they’ve been especially spectacular. The road cycling event through the city created one of the most dramatic sports panoramas in Games history as the course wended it way past the city's major historical attractions. And speaking of visual beauty, the main Olympic stadium is a stunning architectural feast, with its new gracefully arched, giant plastic-canopies, which were added to the existing stadium to transform it into a modern landmark and shield spectators from intense sunlight (specially coated panels reflect 60 percent of the sunlight).

• It’s common knowledge that there’s a lot of grabbing, pulling, and elbowing under the water's surface in polo, so at future Olympics, why not create underwater windows for judges to watch for fouls or place scuba-wearing referees in the pool to check for unnecessary roughness?

• One of the best Olympic-themed TV commercials is also one of the simplest. It’s for insurance company AIG and depicts the letter “I” as a gymnast swinging from a line stretched over the “A” and “G” in the company's logo. Occasional wisps of powder provide a telling detail. Gymnasts use lots of the stuff to improve their grip on the various apparatuses.

• Maybe it’s a case of stereotyping, but it seems odd to find Chinese women playing beach volleyball, looking every bit like Californians.

• Just getting to the Games has to be a terrific lift for Iraq, but for the soccer team to play so well has been especially inspiring given that under the old regime members of the team were subjected to torture and humiliation when they performed below the expectations of Uday Hussein, the country’s former soccer and Olympic boss.

• The International Olympic Committee is reportedly considering dropping three sports after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Baseball, softball, and modern pentathlon are on the bubble. Here’s guessing they'll all stick, partly because the IOC has always been very reluctant to drop sports. The last cut was horse polo after the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Although horses make modern pentathlon an expensive sport for athletes and organizers, the five-event competition was devised by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Games, and first incorporated in 1912. Therefore, it’s probably protected by tradition. Maybe, though, they should drop the equestrian portion of the event and stick with the other four tests – swimming, shooting, running, and fencing.

Softball may be a little too much of a US showcase at the moment for some Olympic officials, but that in all likelihood will change before too long. Plus, it’s a women’s team sport and the Olympics are big on gender equity these days. Baseball may be facing the most serious challenge for survival. Baseball stadiums are expensive to build and can be white elephants in host countries where baseball is not a popular sport. Then, too, Olympic officials have critized the sport for not getting all its top players to the Games. Major leaguers, have been no-shows and according to Commissioner Bud Selig it's going to stay that way. He's more interested in a possible World Cup-like tournament that could be arranged out of season so as to avoid disrupting the pennant races.

• Andy Roddick, the reigning US Open tennis champion, made this cogent observation about his disappointment in losing at the Olympics: “It’s not the biggest thing in our sport,” he said, “but it’s the biggest thing in sports.”

• Give American shooter Matt Emmons credit for being philosophical about the momentary lapse of concentration that may have cost him the gold medal in the 50-meter, 3-position rifle event. Emmons fired at the wrong target on his ninth shot, aiming at the adjoining target of Austria’s Christian Planer, who was in the lane next to his. A former gold medallist in the event, Emmons had a commanding lead when he commited the error, which resulted in a zero score and dropped him into eighth and last place in the final. “I’ll live to shoot another day,” he said stoically, already anticipating competing in Beijing in 2008.

• I never cease to be amazed when the male gymnasts in the floor exercise start spinning like tops, their legs straight out, from a sitting position.

• One of the best things I ever discovered in an Olympics goodie given to reporters was a small wood-handled metal spatula or turner at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. It was a memento from a McDonald’s cooking-crew Olympics (obviously for flipping hamburgers) and it has been a favorite kitchen-drawer utensil long after cap, T-shirts, and other freebies vanished.

• Have you ever wondered how coaches who tower above pint-size female gymnasts manage to teach their charges to do all those incredible tricks and routines without actually showing them? I have.

Wouldn’t if be terrific if even a tenth of the estimated $1.5 billion spent on Olympic security in Athens could be put toward relief efforts in Sudan?

One wonders about the consequences of such a huge bill, not only for these Games, but for those in the future. Greek citizens will be stuck with a seriously inflated overall bill of about $7.36 billion for the current Olympics, which may amount to about $1,000 apiece in additional taxes.

In the long term, the exorbitant price tag could severely limit the number of cities that desire to host the Games. The Olympics could eventually end up rotating among a small group of major cities that can afford the security costs or possibly be permanently placed in one location that already has the necessary facilities, including security network.