There’s an old joke I first heard when Tiger Woods was still a golfing sensation that sometimes makes me think of home, especially in the lead-up to the Pan-Am Games:

Jesus and Moses are golfing, and Jesus decides to try to hit a drive over a long water hazard instead of around it. “I saw Tiger Woods do it — if he can, I can,” he says.

He hits it in the water. Moses parts the lake to fetch the ball and Jesus takes a Mulligan, lining up his shot over the water, again. “If Tiger Woods can do it, I can do it,” he says.

Moses says fine, but if it goes in the drink again he’s getting his own ball. Jesus hits right into the lake again and, grumbling, wanders out on top of the bunker looking for it.

The next foursome approaches the tee and sees the guy walking around on the surface of the water. “Who does this dude think he is,” they ask Moses, “Jesus Christ?”

“Nah,” Moses replies. “He thinks he’s Tiger Woods.”

In Toronto we spend a lot of time grumbling about the things they do in other cities that we can’t or won’t do here, ever concerned with what we’re not: Look at the bicycling culture in Copenhagen! The subway network in New York! The architecture in Paris! The waterfront in Chicago! The elevated expressway they removed in San Francisco!

That, maybe sadly, isn’t us, and we’re all too aware of it. (When I say we, I certainly include myself — I’ve written my share of “If they can do it …” columns, and I’ll probably write more, and probably soon.) Often we’re more aware of what we’re not doing than we are of the things we do well: excellent public schools; widespread well-used bus network; great access to medical care; thriving arts and culture scene; relatively good economy; the safest streets of any major North American city… all those mundane, tiny urban miracles that, added up, put Toronto on top of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s index of indexes measuring the best places to live in the world earlier this year.

When you’re frustrated that you can’t reach the green off the tee, you can get obsessed with that. And you can forget that walking on water is a pretty great skill in its own right.

And when what you want to do is host the Olympics, you can overlook how downright pleasant it might be to host some other, smaller event. Like, say, the Pan Am Games.

In the lead-up to the event, the city’s favourite pastime seemed to be whinging: about the expected traffic, the endless construction, the expected traffic, the budget, the expected traffic, the crowds, the expected traffic. And beneath all these complaints there was the unmistakable sense that many thought these games were just sort of beneath us: all this work and hassle, and it isn’t even the Olympics. Hell, it’s not even the Commonwealth Games. A New York Times observer understandably previewed the games “landing with a thud” in “indifferent Toronto.”

But a funny thing happened once the Games finally got underway. The long-promised gridlockapocalypse didn’t materialize. The endless construction all came to an end and we got to see the place all spruced up for a party: fancy new pedestrian strolls on Queens Quay and Front St. and a whole fancy new neighbourhood (complete with 253 units of affordable housing and a fancy new park) in the athletes’ village on the West Don Lands. There’s a sign made of giant letters spelling “TORONTO” in Nathan Phillips Square that has become instantly (and unpredictably) beloved, and we’ve been getting to see fireworks fired from the CN Tower and City Hall. On Tuesday, organizers announced that Kanye West, arguably the biggest music star in the world, would headline the closing ceremonies.

All that and sports, too: not just the ones we’re usually fanatical about around here, but novelty events like roller speed-skating and wakeboarding.

Look, it still ain’t the Olympics — you only need to see Canada leading the medal standings with eleventy-odd golds so far to understand that — and even with some infrastructure legacy projects, it isn’t an event that is going to stand as a defining moment in Toronto’s history.

Will the games turn us into New York or London, or allow us to hit the green with our tee-shot? Nope.

Are they worth all the money and time and planning it took? I don’t know, time will tell, though those costs are sunk whether they prove to be justified or not.

What the Games are turning out to be is a kind of a fun, relatively hassle-free theme project for a summer in the city, one that gives us something to do and talk about, and has brought plenty of enthusiastic visitors to town whose joy is infectious. As summer projects go, it beats moose sculptures. (Not that, you know, there’s anything wrong with moose sculptures.)

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Despite our best efforts to convince ourselves otherwise, the Games are turning out to be a pretty good party, in a city that needs periodic reminders that it’s allowed to party, and that when it does it can be a pretty great place. I realize that ain’t walking on water, but in Toronto, it still feels a bit like a miracle.