Only because it's remotely topical, I mention that my nightmares remain blessedly few and that only three reoccur -- the one where I can't get to where I've got to be, the one with the snakes, and the one where I'm trapped in a room with a television that gets only four channels:

• The Regis Philbin Channel.

• The Larry King Channel.

• QVC.

• The Winter Olympics Channel.

Worse, the twisted, unseen sadist who has entrapped me has ordered the Olympics package without the hockey games.

AAAAAHHHHH!

At least in this beat-up little suburb of the total mental-health universe, the dearth of Olympic hockey is only a dream, only potentially discomfiting. But for an entire nation north of the border, in wide-awake real life, the Olympics begin when the first puck drops Tuesday next and end when they put a gold medal around Sidney Crosby's neck, with room in between for only hockey analysis and ill-timed childbirth.

Any wavering from that script is forecast to trigger a wide-awake, real-life mental-health crisis from British Columbia to Nova Scotia -- which is no way to run a country. I like Canada and especially Canadians, but when you've entangled the very core of your national identity to a couple of bouncing pucks in a Vancouver fortnight, only the mental-health professionals stand to benefit.

Thus, I urge our Canadian friends to expand their Olympic consciousness, just as I did for most of Tuesday in researching the ramp-up to Friday's opening ceremonies. NBC, which is planning hours upon hours of Olympic coverage, including the obligatory people with near-perfect features sitting by a fireplace smiling madly, is asking visitors to its website to rank their favorite Winter Olympic sports in order of belovedness.

Admittedly, this would have been easier for me had I been able to name some. The network provided a list, but first I tried it freestyle. That first attempt: hockey, figure skating, speed skating, bobsled, ski jumping, curling, Iditarod, skunk throwing, ice fishing, luge, luge throwing, biathlon and synchronized snow-angeling.

Not even close, it turns out.

The actual menu goes alpine skiing, biathlon, bobsled, cross-country skiing, curling, figure skating, freestyle skiing, luge, hockey, Nordic combined skiing, short-track skating, skeleton, ski jumping, snowboarding, speed skating.

No dogs in the Olympics, and no fish or skunks, either.

Hmph!

The rest of it is coming back to me, as I must have remembered it from television's 1994 attempts to frame the question of whether figure-skating biker chick Tonya Harding would end up hitting somebody with something. That's a long time ago, but, as I remember it, bobsled really involves no sled, nor very often anyone named Bob. It's more of a torpedo-shaped bumper car loaded with a coupla three passengers hurtling down a chute of ice at dangerous speeds. Luge is the same thing without the bumper car, with the contestant on his back with his head facing up the mountain and his stocking feet leading toward glory or heartache, as it should be. Skeleton is luge but in the opposite position (on your stomach with your head facing down the chute) or at least I think that's right. If it's not, I'm not sure I want to know what they call skeleton.

The Canadians have had Olympic success at some of these things, just not to the extent that it would ever assuage the grief of not winning the hockey gold on Canadian soil. A medal in curling, for example, even though there are said to be a million people in the sport in Canada, isn't going to pay the mental-health bills.

Curling, should you have forgotten, is the sport with the disks and the brooms.

I know.

The American curling team is taking this so seriously, it has anointed San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis its honorary co-captain. Davis got interested in curling in the fall, it has been reported, a year after head coach Mike Singletary excoriated him after sending him to the locker room during a game against Seattle.

"It's more about them than it is about the team," Singletary said of guys like Davis. "Cannot play with them, cannot win with them, cannot coach with them. Can't do it."

Pointedly, Singletary never came close to saying you can't make one the honorary co-captain of the Olympic curling team.

So Canada would do well to remember, it's all about the medals, ultimately. But the fact is, if they win a hockey game Feb. 28, no one will care what the prize is. No medals, no problem. In the Winter Olympics in Paris in 1920, no medals were awarded. Instead, winners were given valuable pieces of art.

I know what you're thinking. Since that predates the paintings of Mazeroski's homer and Lambert with his teeth out, how valuable could they have been, really?

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