But the sign at the ticket booth said, "Pick up only." Forty minutes before puck drop, the line for the security checkpoint was a quarter-mile deep under a moderate rain, thousands of people in umbrellas and slickers. Most of the people were wearing red flags, but they weren't for the Cantons of Helvetia. These were Canadians who just wanted to watch hockey, any hockey. They had bought the place out.

Olympic ticketing has its set process. Organizers generally sell seats as far ahead of the Games as they can, slowly releasing batches for the premier events first -- in order to maximize cash flow in the years leading up to the festival. Pools of seats are then made available to citizens of the host nation, and anything that's left goes to general sale nine to 12 months before the Opening Ceremony. So the Games are usually either "sold out" or "95 percent booked." It only takes one visit to the Olympics to know that this type of news is all useless misnomer that should be completely ignored.

The secondary ticket market has traditionally been shady business, but it's being legitimized and transformed into an above-table industry in some countries. In America, for instance, the company that sells you the seats can also be the one that brokers exchanges. But at the Olympics, things are pretty much still done the old-fashioned way.

Six men with laminated placards of different shapes and sizes walked up and down the line. Half hollered out, "Who's got extras? Extra tickets? Who's selling, who's selling?" Others, closer to the invisible 1000-feet forcefield around the arena, had the opposite message. "Who needs tickets? Who's buying, who's buying?"

I was in the latter group, so I approached a thin Baltic-looking gentleman in a brand-name leather jacket. "What you got?" He pulled a short stack of the oversized tickets from his coat pocket, and let me hold the top one. "Category A," he said in a thick accent. "Beautiful view of the action. 120 dollars."

I looked at the original price -- 100 dollars -- and turned the deal down. The line kept moving slowly, but anybody who was standing still could start to see the connections between these seemingly independent contractors. Each one of them was one in a larger whole. I stood back, sipped my Blenz coffee, and observed the operation.

Everything ran seamlessly. One man stood off to the side, wearing a Bluetooth headset; after each transaction, the placard-bearing buyer or seller would return to his area. He was the nerve center, the one who tracked inventory and set rates. Another man about 10 feet away concealed a large wad of bills in his coat, and also had an envelope of tickets. His job seemed to be that of a banker -- making sure that the footsoldiers were not carrying too many tickets (to maintain the appearance of scarcity) or cash (to make changing bills more difficult). All the while, the bluejacket Vancouver 2010 volunteers looked on helplessly. There was nothing they could do outside of the safe zone.

The sellers and buyers ran up and down the line. The buyers would tend to stray beyond the queue, asking people just walking up if they had any extras. The sellers hovered around the ticket booth, looking to make deals with those like me, who walked up expecting to buy tickets the old traditional Olympic way (with Visa, of course). There was an older man selling small plastic flags off a tarp on the grass. He was in on it too. "Canada flags, Sweden flags, Switzerland flags," he called out. "Any extra tickets you're selling?"

Ten minutes to noon, and I made another test. I tracked down a different seller, a short man in a red shirt. He asked me, "What are you looking for?"

"Worst seat in the house," I replied.

"Sorry, we only have the best ones left," he said. He quickly got the attention of another seller and made a hand gesture. I could tell I was on the blacklist.

Noon passed, and five minutes later, the end of the line faded into the safe zone.

A young man on a bicycle rolled up, and got the attention of Leather Jacket. "Any singles left?"

"Category A," I heard him say. "Beautiful view of the action. 100 dollars."

The bicyclist straightened, turned his bike to ride away. "Wait," Leather Jacket said. "Make me a deal."

It was the moment I'd been waiting for. I chucked my coffee cup sideways into a trash bag and approached.

"Just need one," I said. "Category B's fine."

"What do you want to pay for it?" Leather Jacket said. "75... 60..."

"30," I said.

It was about as close to an Olympic victory as I'm ever going to get. I pulled a pair of Canadian twenties from my pocket. As he pulled his stack of bills out, he tried one last maneuver.

"I'm sorry, I only have one five," he said. "You want to flip?"

"No," I answered.

A pause, and then Leather Jacket called out to the Banker. "Got five?"

Banker came over, and after some vaudeville pantomime, gave me a pair of twonies and a loon. "Thanks guys," I said. "See you next week."

These are the Olympics in the terrorism-response era, and the entry to each arena is a maze of barriers, metal detectors, bag checks and patdowns. If you are 1000 feet from the gate half an hour before the event, you're not going to see the whole thing. For 30 minutes, we stragglers made slow progress, listening to an endless loop of recorded welcomes from Martin Short and Elvis Costello.

And in that half-hour is the primary slipknot in the Olympic ticket-scalping racket; the other one is that if you show up hours ahead of time, the market is still fluid and unknown. But in that timeframe right before the scheduled time, secondary tickets are artificially inflated. You're going to be late either way.

I was indeed late. At 12:35, I stood at the entry of Section 208, waiting with others for a stoppage in play -- the common hockey courtesy practiced the world over. It came with a roar from the crowd, as Danijela Rundqvist had scored the first goal of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, which turned out to be the first of three in Sweden's shutout win. I'd missed the moment, but was it worth 95 dollars?

Later on, in downtown Vancouver, I was walking by one of the many (many, many) Starbucks in the city. There was a group of six men at an outdoor table, some with laminated "buying"/"selling" placards hung around their neck -- I recognized the blocky Times New Roman from the signs I'd seen earlier at UBC. I thought I recognized one of the men, too. They were all gathered around a laptop, and some had manila envelopes full of tickets.

The organization seemed bigger and more organized than I ever thought, and I realized that I was never going to truly beat the system. I walked up to the table, and bought a luge ticket for next week. At face value.