What struck me most about the Olympics was how fast the half-month passed.

But wow, what a couple of weeks.

Lindsey Vonn’s dream shattered along with her leg going all out in her downhill shot at mind-blowing history seems so long ago. She’s back, maybe home in Park City, already five surgeries in.

And for me, anyway, it book-ended with freeskier Nick Goepper trying a halfpipe trick that had never been landed before in competition in his go-for-gold moment.

That he landed on the lip with his hip takes nothing away from his glory in my eyes. Neither did Vonn drifting a few inches to clip a gate.

If anything, I appreciated them more.

Not that the Park City trio — Chris Lillis, Kaila Kuhn and Connor Curran — who teamed up for gold in the last ski event, mixed team aerials, were any slouches. By doing so they set a new U.S. record for gold medals in a Winter Olympics at 11 before the hockey team added another for 12.

It’s just that I gravitate to the toughest tests of athletic and I suppose other pursuits in life. When character is revealed even beyond what talent, discipline and a dose of luck can deliver.

Of course, this comes from the dad secretly and stupidly proud of his teen daughter insisting on finishing a Nordic race on an ankle torn to shreds, his college son running on a broken leg and still beating 100 of nearly 300 runners at a University of Colorado home cross country meet. Their coaches weren’t nearly so thrilled with their season-ending displays of, um, character.

Just so you understand the depth of this writer’s depravity and sense of sport. Playing hurt or paying the consequences when going beyond, way beyond, runs the other way from gold. But it’s really the stuff of humanity at our gritty best. At least in one sense.

Goepper came up smiling and stayed smiling even as a competitor from a different country nosed him off the podium. That gets to another aspect of the Olympics that might stay with me longer. The camaraderie among the athletes was unbelievable. Or maybe not so much if you consider how much time and how much they have gone through together to reach this apex.

Tight-knit teams, sure. But hugging and cheering for rivals from around the world? Isn’t that un-American these days?

Of course, our reporters and photographer in Italy stuck closest to the Park City athletes, then Utahns, then ski town rats across the West. That was largely the skiers, along with speedskater Casey Dawson and hometown darling of the luge Ashley Farquharson, whose family has a sandwich shop next door to the paper.

Can’t speak to the hockey teams, figure skaters and such, or other headliners in the Peacock eye more prone to preening, squabbling and/or perhaps getting more caught up in themselves, though doubtless it’s unfair to say so from afar.

I’m intending only to draw a distinction to what looks to me like extraordinary closeness among largely the undercard competitors in the Games and their Park City representation who have done us very, very proud in the most important ways. The medals have next to nothing to do with it. Gold, bronze or silver linings, maybe, at most.

We glom on to Lindsey as a Park City local, though she’s way more worldwide and I’d say unapproachable than that, which I understand. The Park Record is not exactly the key to what comes next for her on the stage where she’s more than earned her place.

Besides, we’re all about the kids in the town, so many superior athletes, whose big moments come mainly in four-year intervals before taking their place as moms and dads raising the next gen in town as docs, realtors, shop owners, marketers, educators, coaches, commentators, whathaveyou. That is, part of the “ordinary” community fabric in Park City.

There’s another Olympian trait I admire, a kind of mental and emotional equivalent of long distance biathlon, that combination of endurance and precision under pressure. This is how I look at our team covering these Games scattered across northern Italy: Klara Meyer and Jack Singer reporting, and David Jackson photographing.

You can best see their efforts in the print editions, all those pages devoted to our athletes, along with the features they did between contests to bring the experience home in a way no one else could. I know as I write they’ll come back exhausted, having in their way left it all on the field. And I hope they’re elated at how they did, gold medal work in their editor’s view, though of course you are the real judge of that.

Credit our owners big time, too. This wasn’t my idea, being more in the frame of covering our Olympians from afar like virtually every ski town news entity and more than a few larger ones. I might have sent one reporter for color, like we used to do with a previous company that owned a chunk of ski town papers at peak, including this one.

And another effort I had nothing to do with whatsoever right at home: Jay Hamburger writing stories on Park City leaders going to Italy, reporting on their experiences while they were there, and no doubt ready to debrief them after they’re back. Also Cannon Taylor catching Heber Valley Chamber chief Dallin Koecher fresh from the Games in Italy. It’s called initiative, the very spark of at least small-town journalism.

All of this will literally come home to roost sooner than we think. All that spirit, all that energy and camaraderie, all that talent and training and fortitude will be on display in a blink in 2034, just wait and see. Now we’re just a France 2030 away. Yes, something about the Games makes time speed up. Tick, tock.

Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.