Ah, Certainty!

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This is how sports are always supposed to work--as allegories for deeper human conflicts, not merely as displays of strength and skill--but what's different now is how desperately we need them to and how grateful we are when they succeed. While I don't feel entirely satisfied with the clever Solomonic compromise that settled the figure-skating issue (why not just chop the one gold medal in half?), I'm glad that the lofty figures behind the scenes finally acted. I'm tired of hung juries. I'm tired of not knowing whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead. I'm tired of corporate balance sheets that don't balance.

Especially nowadays, I want results. Gold, silver or bronze. No tin, no plastic. None of that mystery alloy the government uses in those oddly light, play-money quarters it has been minting.

That's why I feel myself drawn to this year's Games with a fervor I didn't quite expect: every night, dependably and wonderfully, they deliver small, verifiable results. There's suspense first, of course, but it's tolerable suspense--nothing like waiting for Congress to vote on campaign-finance legislation or sitting through a year of Enron hearings to find out whether the poker-faced Ken Lay is history's biggest con man or sorriest dupe. It was nip and tuck there for a while before Bode Miller finally took the silver in the men's combined downhill, but only for a while.

Definite endings. The Olympics offer those too. There may be no time limit to the war on terrorism. And the recession, depending on whom you talk to, is either over, about to end or somewhere in between. But when the lugers break that laser beam, that's it, no do-overs, no instant replays. How quaint, in a way, and how profoundly comforting: numbers that mean something, numbers that stay put, unlike the closing figures on the Dow.

And when the Olympics themselves end, as they must...? I'd rather not think about that. Yet.