On the evening of Feb. 28, 2010, Miro Cernetig was feeling “exhausted, but pretty amazing.”

After 17 roller-coaster days of the Vancouver Olympics, not to mention the lead-up to the Games, “I think the whole city felt that way,” Cernetig recalls.

Cernetig, then a Vancouver Sun columnist, was sitting with his laptop in the packed lobby restaurant of the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, while the men’s gold medal hockey final played on the big TV above the grand piano. Typing out his final Olympic column, Cernetig tapped into what he was feeling around him.

Vancouver had just received unprecedented exposure, with more than 3.5 billion people tuning in for at least part of the Games, Cernetig wrote, updating and reinvigorating “the brand of Vancouver and Canada.”

“To the world, we’re not a slee

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