After 10 days of Olympic madness, Tim Keown is off to spring training. He filed this pre-Closing Ceremonies appraisal of Salt Lake 2002.

SALT LAKE CITY -- They're calling him a hero. To his face, even. They're telling him he ought to get used to it, that it comes with the territory.

Danny Kass just laughs. Hero? Get a grip.

“That's kind of weird,” he says. “Do I believe it? No. I mean, it's kind of hard to believe, don't you think?”

Just a few weeks ago, Kass was happy to go through life like a 12-year-old on a dare. The Olympics didn't mean that much to him. He had his snowboard and his tricks and his friends. Is there anything else? Sure, he knew about the Olympic dream and the drippy sentimentalism and the inevitable flag-waving that would come with competing on his home turf. Duty, honor, country. All that. No offense -- it just wasn't his gig.

But then Kass, the 19-year-old snowboarding bad boy from New Jersey by way of California, went out and won himself a silver medal in the halfpipe. That put him on the podium with teammates Ross Powers (gold) and J.J. Thomas (bronze) in the first U.S. Winter Games sweep since 1956. And standing there at the Medals Plaza, with the Mormon Temple providing the anomalous backdrop, Kass looked up at the flag waving and heard the anthem playing, and suddenly the Olympics meant something. Suddenly, it wasn't no big deal. “I got real affected by it,” he says. “Yeah, more than I expected. The whole thing was cool, unbelievable.”

That's right. “Even the Jersey boy teared up,” Picabo Street noted after the final race of her career. “That's what the Olympics are all about. They touch you. You can say they won't, but they will.”

You see, there was more to the XIX Winter Games than the controversy surrounding pairs figure skating. There was more to it than outraged Canadians and indignant Russians and the astounding medal reversal that gave David Pelletier and Jamie Sale a set of golds to match those owned by Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze. There was more to it than the unprecedented $310 million security effort, with more than 15,000 police officers, military troops, Secret Service agents, CIA personnel and rent-a-cops on every corner.

There was more to it because there's always more to it at the Olympics. Everyone here has a story.

An enlightening story like the one told by slalom skier Bagher Kalhor, one of two Iranian Olympians. He carried his country's flag during the Opening Ceremony, just 11 days after President Bush labeled Iran a member of the “Axis of Evil.” He stood in the same stadium and, like all the other athletes, waited anxiously for the president to declare the Games open. “If I had a chance to talk to him, I would have told him that everything he said about us was wrong,” says Kalhor, a 22-year-old sheepherder from the mountains north of Tehran. “I would have told him we are just like you -- good people -- and we have no quarrel with any of you. We condemn terrorism just as you do, because we have been victims of terrorism long before you. When I came into the stadium, I just wanted to raise my flag higher and wave it stronger and show your president I'm proud of my country.”

An improbable story like the one spun by 20-year-old Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann, who saved the first win of his career for the biggest stage of all, then went out and did it again -- two hills, two golds (only the second time that's happened in Olympic individual competition). Or the tale of speed skater Derek Parra, the Home Depot floor-and-wall specialist who stunned the competition when he broke the world record in the 5,000 meters. He held the mark for only 27 minutes, but he wound up walking through the Olympic Oval with tears in his eyes, a flag under his arm and silver to his name. “Maybe this shows there's room for a working-class man on the podium,” Parra says. “The people in Holland are sitting at their computers right now, e-mailing their friends, saying, ‘This can't be right. This can't be right.' ”

An emphatic story like the one carved out by Kelly Clark, the 18-year-old snowboarder who completed a dramatic final run down the halfpipe to win the first U.S. gold medal. Disappointed with the venue's music selections, she tucked her MiniDisc player into the pocket on her right thigh and jammed to Blink 182 while everyone else was treated to tarmac-level AC/DC. Asked to provide historical perspective on her win, Clark shrugged: “I don't know. Last Olympics I was in ninth grade. I think I taped it because I was in class.”

An utterly preposterous story like the one that found Australian short track speed skater Steven Bradbury the winner of his country's first-ever Winter Games gold. His strategy in the 1,000m was a testament to modesty: hang back and hope for the worst. It worked in the semis, when a multiskater crash sent him to the finals. It worked again in the finals, when a pileup in the last turn left him the last man standing. Fans booed Bradbury after Apolo Anton Ohno was stuck with silver. But if there's one guy who deserved a break, it was the 28-year-old Aussie. He lost four liters of blood and took 111 stitches in his right leg after falling in a 1994 World Cup race. Two years ago, he broke his neck in another spill. “Obviously, luck was on my side,” says the four-time Olympian, whose previous best was a relay bronze in Lillehammer. “But that's the way short track goes sometimes. The gold is a reward for all the hard slug I've put in.”

The Winter Games have become a semicombustible mixture of tradition and extremism, and the 2002 Salt Lake Games may be remembered as pivotal in the transition. While figure skating stewed in its own poisonous broth, sports like snowboarding and moguls bounced right along, generating good vibes at every turn. (More proof of the schism: After finishing their event at Park City Resort, Powers and Thomas were seen signing the bare breasts of a female spectator.)

Down in Soldier Hollow, home of cross country and biathlon, they held the Olympics in a minor key. One by one, athletes took to the backcountry. “It takes a lot of self-discipline to be out there all by yourself, day after day,” says Todd Lodwick, whose seventh in Nordic combined was the highest ever for an American. “It's lonely, but sometimes being out in the wilderness, looking at what's around you, isn't a bad place to be.”

And yet, when it comes to summing up these Games, it's somehow fitting that a figure skater -- an Alabama man in a turquoise blouse who finished fifth in the most disputed event of them all -- is the one who found the words not even a 19-year-old snowboarder from Jersey could dispute. “The ideal of the Olympics is to be the best you can be when it's time to compete,” says American pairs skater John Zimmerman. “I'm touched by the ideal of peace and sport. And to do the best I can in that environment is the coolest thing I could imagine."

This article appears in the March 4 issue of ESPN The Magazine.