Oh, the pageantry! The excitement! The national pride! There’s just something about the Olympics – when that music starts with all its pomp and circumstance – that gets my heart swelling. I marvel at the athletes who work so hard, for so many years, hoping first for the opportunity to go for gold, and then going for said gold. There’s something about all that time and effort dovetailing into that one moment. It can be heartbreaking, but when the athletes in whom you’ve invested your hopes achieve gold, it’s exhilaration of the best kind! I can’t begin to imagine what it’s like for athletes who have trained and sacrificed with so much love and passion for their sport, who have pushed their bodies to the limit for that chance that comes only once every four years. So few people can actually achieve what they do, but through them, the rest of us get a taste, and it is marvelous! It’s two weeks of the best kind of party, one that catches you up with incredible highs and gut-wrenching lows and, in the end, is all worth it. Yes, worth it! I feel it most with the inevitable letdown, when the Olympics end and life becomes ordinary again. When the Olympics are here I must savor it. I must be its fan girl!