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You could see the pain and frustration in the Canadians’ faces afterward. As they walked through the media area, several appeared close to tears. Most of them, though, just looked pissed off. “We’ve been really angry for two days,” ever since the end of the round robin, said middle blocker Jaime Thibeault. “We really wanted to use that anger in a positive way and go through today and I think we weren’t able to do that. You can just tell we had a lot of ups and downs.”

Thibeault, like her teammates, looked tired and upset. But when asked about the Pan Am Games themselves and her experience here, she brightened. “Honestly, it’s amazing,” she said. “This is the best Canadian crowd I’ve ever, ever played in my entire career. It’s sad we didn’t show them how we can actually play … But Pan Am itself has been just amazing. And we’re just going to keep going, keep fighting.”

For the Pan Am Games, success is both abstract and not. There are results, of course, concrete ones. And by that measure, the Canadian women’s volleyball team did not succeed. Not by their own standards. “Not even close,” said Thibeault. But many other Canadians did. Team Canada had 187 medals as of Friday afternoon, 69 of them gold. That’s good enough for second place in both categories, behind only the United States.

But success for the Pan Am Games is about more than medals. It’s about the event itself — money and traffic and venues, and an ethereal sense of whether and how much people cared. For the women’s volleyball team, the event seemed successful: 4,000 people watched them play an eighth-place game at an eight-team tournament at 1:30 p.m. on a Thursday. They cheered and stomped and groaned. They lived and died with every serve, spike and dig. Many seemed as heartbroken as the team when Canada lost.