Because it’s such an enormous undertaking, you get a feeling from covering an Olympics that you don’t get doing anything else. It’s hundreds of hours of television. As big as the Super Bowl is – and more people will watch the Super Bowl than will watch any given night of Olympics – you don’t have to mobilize thousands and thousands of people in order to put that on the air. And even though there are things to be skeptical about concerning the Olympics – the commercialism and the hype – there are usually things about it that cut through all that, and you find them uplifting.

There are probably two sides of the coin. Americans will be more excited because it is an American Olympics, just like Los Angeles in ‘84. There’ll be a sense of pride about it. When American athletes do well, there will be a larger contingent of fans rooting for them, and so you’ll get more cheering, more atmosphere. That’s the upside. The downside, with all due respect to Atlanta, is no one’s going to flip on their set in Des Moines and be enchanted like it’s some sort of international travelogue.

I remember from Barcelona Dick Enberg’s piece about the wrestler from Wisconsin who won the silver medal, taking the world-champion Cuban into overtime. The cameras were on his 6-year-old daughter and her reaction – how she couldn’t cope with him losing, even though he’d done himself proud. The little girl was crying. Sometimes television manipulates moments, but other times it just simply captures moments. It’s at its best when it’s just kind of eavesdropping on something that would be essentially the same if TV weren’t there. And when you get those moments, you get touched.

People like to feel as if the host isn’t just dispensing info, but that he or she is enjoying and watching the Games along with them. And if you let the throttle out full in every moment, (a) you’d wear the audience out, and (b) it wouldn’t ring true. I try to capture the drama but not overstate. And so when you have those handful of times when you really have a genuine, spontaneous reaction, people will know it.

I’ve read all the NBC briefing books, each about a foot thick. I’ve watched or will watch almost every compilation that exists of Olympic footage. Every Bud Greenspan film. Every two- or three-hour highlight reel of ABC’s coverage of 1976, ‘72, ‘68. If it exists on tape, I’ll have watched it.

One of the things that distinguishes Olympic coverage is our profiles of the athletes, which, if done well, draw people in. It gives them a reason to have a feeling about the athletes. The average person needs to be introduced to these people, even the American stars.

It’s a force bigger and stronger than all of us, so you can’t really fight it. You just try to carve out your own little space. It’s part of my job – and not just the part that I accept, but a part that I embrace – to be a dramatist. I try not to contribute to the overstatement. I try to provide some perspective and bring some common sense to it.

I’m very lucky, given how much mean-spiritedness is out there, that I’ve fared as well as I have. I hope some of that is a consequence of doing a good job, but I also know that doing a good job and trying to be nice are not any kind of guarantee.

If people said, ““He was well prepared, he enhanced my enjoyment and understanding of the Olympics without getting in the way of my enjoyment of the Olympics. I didn’t mind – even enjoyed – having him figuratively in my living room the last couple of weeks,’’ that would be OK.

I’ll either review the entire canon of Western literature or eat myself sick on peanut brittle. I haven’t decided which.