Now that the Olympics are over, it’s back to reality

Did you enjoy that 17-day Olympic break?

Since Feb. 9, if you caught a reference to Rocket Man it just meant you were hearing an Elton John golden oldie.

Now you have to face stupid reality again. The days of dirty dancing signifying more than a cheesy movie are over.

(By the way, if you’re lucky, you’ll find someone during your life who looks at you the way Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir look at each other while they’re skating. If you have to, settle for someone who looks at you the way Moir looks at a beer at a hockey game.)

Canada got medals in South Korea at 29 events, its best showing yet at a Winter Olympics. The country’s 11 golds put it behind only Winter Games titan Norway and Germany, tied with 14.

But there’s a sense that the national mood is tempered a bit by a relative lack of success in popular events. For every “Pyeongchang Games great for Canada” headline, there’s a corresponding “Canucks stink at curling rink.”

The women’s hockey team finally lost to the Americans in a gold-medal match for the ages, while the men took bronze in a tournament won by Olympic Athletes from Russia, a squad comprised largely of players from the best professional league in the world that doesn’t have anyone from Cole Harbour in it.

We may be in the midst of a generational shift. Canada’s becoming a country known as much for freestyle skiing as figure skating.

There’s a popular metric in hockey these days about how creating time and space are so important. Perhaps time and space are what it’s going to take for some Canadians to gauge just how well the country did in Pyeongchang.

But too much success can be perceived as too much of a good thing, too, at least in Norway. The tiny country’s total of 39 medals has caused plenty of soul searching, according to the New York Times.

“The haul is sure to revive pangs of concern that have shadowed Norway’s streak of victories in recent years — that the country may dominate some winter sports so thoroughly that it is ruining them,” the paper said.

They’re actually sounding more Canadian than a lot of Canadians on social media right now.

But everyone should be putting on a happy face. It’s not like these Games were the end of the world.