The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal are possibly best remembered for Mayor Jean Drapeau's assertion that the Olympics "can no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby."
Well they're best remembered for that quote or for the enormous debt that Montrealers finally paid off only 30 years after the Games finished.
But my memories of Montreal in the summer of '76 have little to do with that kind of stuff. Curiously enough, my memories have little to with sport either.
I did see at least two events during those Games: a soccer match between two countries I had never heard of and judo.
In 1976, soccer wasn't even played in the part of town where I grew up, and although I expected judo to be like a live-action Bruce Lee movie, it turned out to be more like two grown men in pyjamas dragging each other around. All it served to do was teach my older brother new ways to hurt and torment me.
My most vivid memories of the Games come from a little job that a buddy managed to get us.
For a week during the Games, we'd catch the Metro to the Olympic site and made our way to a nearby parking lot. The manager of this lot had thousands of "unofficial" guides to the Games, and our job was to sell these to the visitors making their way to Olympic stadium.
We sold the guides for a quarter, and made a dime on each one.
Of course, we weren't supposed to go onto the Olympic site, but being 14, and recognizing that was the best place to sell, we regularly tried to get lost in the crowds until security guards saw us and chased us from the site.
Sometimes, I think the thrill of being chased was our real motivation for going back.
Our other favourite spot was a practice field where we, and hundreds of others, could peer through a chain link fence to watch athletes train. And that became our sales centre.
During those days, we'd each sell 200 or 300 guides and take home about $20 or $30 a day, a king's ransom for 14-year-olds in Montreal in '76.
My brother reminded me of another thing that happened that summer. A large motorhome was parked pretty much full time in the lot, and one day as we were sitting there after flogging our guides, we saw a camera crew make its way over to the RV.
One of the guys knocked on the door, and out stepped Sugar Ray Leonard.
Howard Cosell had brought a camera crew down to tape an interview with someone whom many people consider, pound-for-pound, the greatest boxer of all time. And my brother, my buddy and I, sat only metres away watching it all unfold before us.
There will be thousands of similar stories after these Games, and now that they've begun, all the legitimate concerns become temporarily irrelevant.
After all, there's no point going out to a party and then sitting in a corner by yourself because you're afraid of a hangover the next day.
Drink deeply and have fun; we'll worry about the consequences later.
