Barring a postgame riot, these Games will be a success in context, easily earning a B-plus for execution. After some early clashes between protesters and police, things calmed down. Security was chaotic and confused during the first week, then it sorted itself out. Transit was confusing initially, but everyone figured it out. The chain reaction of horrible disasters never happened.

But once all of us visitors are gone, all the folks who are reveling in owning the podium are going to remember Vancouver 2010 for a long, long time.

"I don't want to think about what the final security costs are going to be," said a woman two tables over at the Starbucks the other day. "We're going to be paying taxes on this for the rest of our lives."

"Just think of it as pay-per-view," her companion noted. "But this time, we view first, then we pay."

The Olympics Triplecast, alive and well!

This could very well be the last of its kind -- a Winter Games paid for with a virtual credit card. London 2012 might end up being the Financial Apocalympics these were supposed to be (I'd bet on that, myself), but the Western shell game of funny money likely ends with this cycle. Sochi 2014 organizers already have nearly all of the private financing they need, and Rio 2016 will be an interesting new case study. We'll get a peek at how a rapidly developing nation hosts a gigantic global sports event this summer, when South Africa hosts the FIFA World Cup.

For the Whistler resort two hours north, the effects of these Games is readily apparent. Highway 99 has been upgraded, making access easier, and now the world knows its name. But what does Vancouver get, other than a new speedskating oval and the final bill?

I've been carrying around City of Glass by Douglas Coupland, the city's most famous writer. If you don't know his name, you know the phrase he coined: "Generation X." I've always hated his novels, how non-linear they are, how there will be six pages of bizarre diagrams or 130-point Helvetica text inserted for no easily discernible reason. I'll go back and read them all this summer, now that I have a better idea of where they came from.

City of Glass is a series of essays about Vancouver. I saved it for these last few days of the Games, because I wanted to form my own impressions before they were colored or adjusted. Coupland talks about what it feels like to live here.

He details Vancouver's odd relationships with straitlaced provincial capital Victoria (a city it's long since surpassed in power) and the rest of Canada (it's too far away from national capital Ottawa to be affected much by its laws). He explains why the dominant style of architecture (the glass "see-through" residential skyscraper) was inspired by wealthy Hong Kong businessmen looking for crash pads in case the British handover to the Chinese in 1997 went badly (it didn't). He talks about the movie-of-the-week industry that can magically turn Vancouver into any American city, on the cheap.

The idea took two weeks to crystallize in my mind, but reading this book made me realize that for a metropolis of 2.5 million, there are no freeways at all here. Highway 99, the mother road that links the U.S. border with Vancouver, and on up to Whistler, turns into a two-lane street at Granville and winds and twists and crawls through downtown. And it's a city of islands! As such, Vancouver is very dependent on a series of thin bridges.

Lions Gate Bridge is by no means a practical bridge -- it looks to be spun from liquid sugar, and, unfortunately, it now seems to be dissolving like sugar. By urban planning and engineering standards it borders on being a disaster, but then isn't it true of life in general that nothing is more seductive than the dying starlet?

There is no city in North America like Vancouver. It has no root system, mostly because the previous residents, who lived here for thousands of years, were bloodlessly displaced just over a century ago. Over half the people who live here now are not from here. The three most common surnames are Lee, Wong and Chan; a lot of its residents are from an ocean away. The skyline is transformed on a monthly basis -- it only takes a few weeks to put up a new see-through. And it can't spread out much more, as it's surrounded by mountains, the ocean and the U.S. border. All the same, Vancouver sits on the same geological undersea ridge as San Francisco does, and would disappear into the mud if the Big One hits.

Hosting the Olympics is just another adventure for southwestern British Columbia, a very expensive one. When the tax bill for these Games is finally paid in full, Vancouver will probably be on to the next round of exciting uncertainty; most of the signs that 2010 even happened here will be hard to find. Just like any real visible reminders of Expo 86 -- gone.

Because that's what Vancouver does: it continually reinvents itself.

In 1986, I arrived back in Vancouver after living abroad for a year. On that first evening back I looked down at the bridge and saw that it had been garlanded with brilliant pearls of light along its parabolic lines. I was shocked - it was so beautiful that it made me lose my breath.

I asked my father about these lights, and he told me they were called "Gracie's Necklace," after a local politician. In the almost five decades since the bridge had been built, the city had been secretly dreaming of the day it could cloak its bridge in light, and now the dream had become real life.

Now, whenever I fly back to Vancouver, it is Gracie's Necklace I look for from my seat, the sight I need to see in order to make myself feel at home again. We often forget, living in Vancouver, that we live in the youngest city on Earth, a city almost entirely of, and only of, the twentieth century -- and this is Vancouver's greatest blessing. It is the delicacy of Gracie's Necklace that reminds me we live, not so much in a city but in a dream of a city.

The Olympics, too, are a structurally unsound dream-bridge, made of faulty building materials like sweetness and light. The Games attempt to point the way over a wide chasm, towards a mythical place where the youth of the world can forever understand each other through sport, art and culture. But the bridge dissolves after 16 days, no more and no fewer, because it can't last any longer than that. It's certainly seductive, and we try our hardest to cross, but it's too late now. Time to scurry back to the other side.