If you are like, oh, about 65 per cent of the Canadian population, you were watching on the final day of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics when hockey superstar-turned-national hero Sidney Crosby wristed a shot that snuck under U.S. goaltender Ryan Miller's pads to give Canada the gold medal in men's hockey for the second time since NHL players started competing in the Olympics in 1998.

And, most likely, you thought it was a wonderful way to cap off an Olympics that, tragically, began with the death of a Georgian luger before the opening ceremonies had even started, then predictably moved on to Canadian commentators gnashing their teeth over Canada's lack of early medals before, amazingly, 12 mostly unknown athletes and teams overcame long odds to win gold medals that, added to those won by the men's and women's hockey teams, gave Canada the most gold medals of any country and a Winter Olympics record of 14.

The twine had barely stopped rippling after Crosby's momentous goal before media pundits started chiming in on the legacy of the games, where Crosby's goal ranked with Paul Henderson's in 1972 and Mario Lemieux's in 1987, and what sort of changes the patriotic outbursts brought on by the Olympics would have on Canada as a country.

There's no question that the games made an impact, from coast to coast to coast, starting with the Olympic torch relay, which began what seems like ages ago now, but was really closer to four months. Thompson got caught up in the excitement as one of the first stops, with hundreds of people gathering at the recreation centre Nov. 7 just to see the torch, which was carried by more than a dozen Northern Manitobans over a stretch from City Hall to the arena.

The local connections didn't end there. Dawn Currie, an R.D. Parker Collegiate graduate, told the Citizen in January about how she'd be in Vancouver for the entire length of the games in her role with Speed Skating Canada. In this issue, you can read about the first-ever female Olympic ski cross champion Ashleigh McIvor, who still has relatives in town, and see pictures from Thompsonites who were in Vancouver for what became "our" Olympics.

In a country as vast as ours, it is a special moment when people from Manitoba can feel a surge of joy from watching a product of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia score a goal during a hockey game in British Columbia.

But it's still just a moment.

Pretty soon, we'll all get back to where we were, the West feeling shut out by the East, Quebec feeling stifled by the all-encompassing Rest of Canada, First Nations feeling neglected and ignored by all of the above, Newfoundland starring as the butt of jokes and Toronto saying, "But enough about me. How world-class do you think I am?"

The buzz – the one from the Olympics, anyway - will soon wear off in Vancouver and two months from now Crosby will just be that flashy player on the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Still, wasn't it nice, if only for a few short weeks, to get excited watching bobsleigh racing, to marvel as figure skater Joannie Rochette not only held up but excelled under the most difficult conditions, to feel pride on hearing the national anthem, and to have your heart race like a lovestruck teenager's just because of a hockey game?

Now, you may be a Manitoban, or a Northerner, or an Acadian, Albertan, Quebecois or Vancouver Islander, but for those of you who care about such things, at the moment you heard that Alexandre Bilodeau was the first-ever athlete from our country to win an Olympic gold medal on home soil, the mixture of pride, joy and relief you felt along with him was purely and simply Canadian.