News flash: There really is a fairy at the bottom of the garden.

Good triumphs over evil, virtue is more than its own reward, all youth are beautiful, class always asserts itself, patriotism isn't corny, selflessness beats selfishness, friendly smiles will melt frowns, nobody is really a stranger, all government employees are honest and wise, and John Furlong can accurately identify magic dust when he sees it, or by the Holy Mother of God he isn't Irish.

And speaking of which, God wears a black and white striped shirt and sees all infractions, but winks at mankind's minor ones and uses the penalty box sparingly.

If, for 17 shining days, the Vancouver/Whistler Winter Olympics didn't persuade you that life is beautiful and without regret, you must have been out of town.

If I were king I'd have driven through the Olympic sites and shovelled gold medals off the back of a truck for every athlete.

All did their countries proud. All made manifest the glories of muscle married to spirit, and many came so wrenchingly close to medal territory -- sometimes measured in two-hundredths of a second, or, like the crushed Devon Kershaw, a second and a half from a medal in men's 50-kilometre cross-country skiing,` a torture easy for ordinary mortals to grasp because it is so humanly earthbound compared with the gravity-defying sky and skate acrobatics that are beyond our experience altogether.

And I'd also bestow gold medals on a great spectrum of people variously connected to the Olympics, some prominent, some modestly obscure, like the blue-clad volunteers who were unanimously, patiently helpful.

I'd fill the pockets of David Atkins with medals. His creation of the opening and closing ceremonies merited the Webster's Dictionary definition of fabulous.

It was a climactic stroke of genius to reprise and exploit the one technical glitch in the former -- Catriona Le May Doan's tussle with a stubborn Olympic flame tower -- and wittily slip it into the closing ceremony, which ended with Michael Buble touching off the hootingly funny satire on Canadian icons: floating moose, huge toothy beavers, dancing Mounties, voyageurs jauntily traipsing around with their legs through canoes, cut-outs of hockey players.

Canadians who couldn't laugh at themselves in the mirror of that send-up are invited to sail immediately to Volcanovia.

Also put on the first Volcanovia-bound boat: people who deplored that some of our women's hockey team swigged spirituous liquors after their grand victory. And leave room on the lower decks for the humourless citizens who indignantly puffed up their ruffs at American comedian Stephen Colbert's jests. We are, let us concede, an inherently rather amusing country, never more so than when we are stiff with cold and rectitude and political correctness.

Inevitably we will come off this high -- which wasn't drug or drink-induced, though the open display of bottles and joints on the streets surprised one savvy Torontonian -- and return to the serious slog of life: Transporting children and walking the dog and being environmentally responsible and enlarging the gross national product and reading this column and all that.

The Vancouver Olympics underlined that the human race needs its frivolities, a break in the action. The Olympics' marriage of hard-won accomplishment and the sensual crowd, a kind of sexiness of being together, is shrewd business. But it couldn't be if it weren't also good escapist fun. Juvenal 2,000 years ago deplored the cynical governmental control of the unwashed by giving them bread and circuses. Well, if it worked for the Romans, it works for me, provided it's good French bread plus the spectacle of Vancouver's 17 days of thrills and, yes, spills.

There was plenty of dour media skepticism before the games and there will be pained mathematics afterwards about their extravagance. And some people were disappointed -- in broadcaster Michael Campbell's sharp blast, "the perennially indignant" who, if they witnessed the Second Coming, "would complain, 'Gee, I thought he would be taller.'" But as one lady, who for those 17 days was laminated to the TV set, said: "We had a really good time, and you pay for your party."

Just one regret here. Where was Diana Krall?

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My wife and I attended the USA-Russia women's hockey game at UBC's Thunderbird Arena. Loved it. The game was a cliffhanger -- 13-0 for the Americans, only four shots on goal by the painfully outclassed Russians. Eventually the crowd began to root for the underdog, wildly cheering every time -- few indeed -- a Russian even touched the puck.

A small aside: A half-dozen Russians, in their czar-like red sweaters, were immediately behind us in the long line-up. They talked in low, dark voices. With friendly intent, I tried several times to catch at least one eye. Didn't. Were they habitually suspicious? Residually bitter about losing the Cold War? Who knows?

At the security check I was frisked more thoroughly than at any airport check I've experienced, though with much kindness and apology. The Russians sailed through.

Then in the washroom I was surprised that the Russians were again in the lineup right behind me. What a coincidence. Was it so paranoid to wonder if they were Communist agents, assigned to assassinate me for my hostile anti-USSR columns of decades ago?

At the urinal I half-expected the tiny prick of a poison dart between the shoulder blades. None. It's deflating to think I'm not important enough to murder.

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Also deflating, and closer to home: Cypress Bowl teetered on the brink of disaster as an Olympic venue in this most unwinterly of Vancouver winters (warmest January, second-warmest February on record). Snow not only had to be trucked in; it was actually moved around within Cypress Bowl for some events, and 20,000 tickets had to be refunded. The boast at the Feb. 10 torch rally that these were "the West Vancouver games" is best forgotten.

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Jenny Kwan, New Democrat MLA for Vancouver-Mount Pleasant, is in many parts an admirable lady, but she gave me a large pain complaining that the Olympic ceremonies didn't reflect our "diversity." Essentially, meaning they didn't publicize the Asian -- ethnic Chinese and East Indian -- "communities" (barely visible in most winter sports). Mind you, the French-Canadian "community" also groused, predictably.

This quota/demographic muscle-flexing tack gives me a large pain. Oh, did I say that? It's soft racism, it's divisive, it's ghettoism of the mind. The so-called politically correct -- who also are the neo-inquisitors of the "human rights" commissions (a.k.a. kangaroo courts) that tried to punish and silence the courageous Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn, Maclean's magazine and their like -- have wedged this notion into the Canadian "identity." Bad.

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West Vancouver-Capilano Liberal MLA Ralph Sultan is a member of the organizing committee for the 50th reunion of his master of business administration class at Harvard Business School, where he was both student and professor.

Those Harvard MBAs went forth and civilized the world as we know it, propagating the like-minded in numerous universities and think-tanks. Which inspired Sultan to wittily and wickedly suggest that the theme of the celebration should be: "Where did we go wrong?"

tlautens@telus.net