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Yet, despite the last minute robocalls, the city hall rallies complete with smiling youngsters carrying placards designed by mom and dad, the TV and newspaper ads and high-minded opinion columns telling ordinary folk that they’re missing out on a chance — oops, THE chance — of their otherwise insipid lives, this turkey flopped just like Eddie the Eagle (nostalgia is for first loves and funerals, not for billion-dollar decisions).

The second thing to understand is that to have been set against this Olympic bid did not make any Calgarian automatically negative, nasty nor a nincompoop.

If someone asks you to jump from the roof of a three-storey building and you reply: “Nope, not doing that” does it make you a negative person? Nor, if you question an ever-evolving budget to finance an event that routinely overspends by billions of bucks by asking who’s on the hook when history invariably repeats, does that make you some cynical knuckle-dragger wanting a return to Calgary of the 1950s?

Yes, there was much emotion, some of it spilling over, from those who decided to vote No. But much of that was frustration — the so-called No side being little more than a bunch of like-minded folk who bumped into each other with little to offer against the Yes side’s millions in funding and official support. It is telling that such a collection of diverse Calgarians actually carried the day despite the odds stacked against them. To churlishly dismiss so many ordinary folks’ opinions as ignorant or mean-spirited is exactly the type of reaction that led to this debacle in the first place.