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For two weeks in February, I had the chance to travel to Vancouver to experience the Games. What sticks out most in my mind about the trip isn’t the actual sporting events, but the sense of joy, revelry, and national pride that permeated the entire city. Canadians have a reputation of being nice, polite and modest. But having left a city locally known as “The Centre of the Universe” for a province whose licence plates bear the tagline “The Best Place on Earth,” I (politely) beg to differ.

We disembarked from the plane to a changed city. Main streets were closed to traffic and had transformed into massive street parties with revelers fervently waving the maple leaf flag. Wherever we looked, no matter how bustling the crowd or how long the line, people beamed and cheered. Crowds broke out into spontaneous renditions of the national anthem, flash-mob dances, and impromptu street hockey games. On-duty police officers passed out high-fives and took pictures for tourists. The city had become a happy, hopping, place-to-be.

The main attractions, the sporting events, were also jubilant.The Canada-Switzerland hockey game we attended was an incredibly uplifting display of patriotism. But it wasn’t always about Canadian pride. People were thrilled to show any kind of pride. At the Germany-Sweden hockey game we saw, we noticed Swedish fans in yellow and blue, German fans in red, orange and black, and locals dressed in red and white –but waving the flags of either playing team. At the surprisingly rowdy curling match we attended, locals cheered for Canada as well as for other countries: our neighbors to the south (“U-S-A!”), France (“Allez les Bleus!”) Switzerland (“Hopp Schwiiz!”), and Norway (“Nice Pants!”) When the American women’s hockey team received their silver medals, some with tears in their eyes, the entire stadium erupted in a show of support, chanting “USA! USA! USA!” –because that’s just how nice Canadians are.

When the 17 days of relentless cheering, chanting, and sporting events came to an end, I returned to the Centre of the Universe a little tired, a little hoarse, but full of a sense of national pride that I realized had always been there. And better than the feeling of patriotism was the feeling of being a part of something bigger, something global, something…Olympic. London 2012? I can’t wait.