Where is time travel when you need it?

LAKE PLACID _ OK, so my timing was a little bit off. Thirty years off, to be exact.

I sat in hotel room here with friends today to watch the U.S. try to win an Olympic gold medal in hockey. They fell in overtime to Canada, 3-2.

Almost exactly 30 years ago, the gold-medal hockey game was in this tiny (pop.2,500) village in the middle of the Adirondacks. The U.S. won that one, but we were in Ann Arbor Mich. for that academic year so I missed it.

Actually, driving around the area, it's hard to believe it could host the Olympics (it has twice, in 1932 besides the '80 games.) Vancouver, site of the games this year, is a world-class city, with the hotels and transportation systems that implies. Even at the height of tourist season, Lake Placid is a sleepy place.

But, alas, the world has changed a lot in 30 years. In 1980, for example, professionals were supposedly banned from Olympic competition, so the hockey players were mostly college kids.

But now they're pros. One of the people watching with me refused to get excited about the game because it was nothing more than a National Hockey League all-star game with the players divided by their citizenship.

Good point. But it was still fun to watch.

One thing I'll never understand. Driving into the village, we went past the ski jumps built for the '80 Olympics. They tower what looks like hundreds of feet over the surrounding countryside.

It's hard to imagine anyone even wanting to go to the top of such a structure, much less slide down off of them and out into space. Yet obviously some people do it all the time.

More power to them, I guess, as long as I don't have to follow them.