ATHENS - The issues that we all obsessed over – in some quarters for years – have barely been worth mentioning.

There hasn’t been a hint that terrorists have targeted the games. Despite all the foot-dragging and stubborn resistance to construction schedules, the venues are ready for competition. The subways are running. The transportation system works. The old center of Athens is a sparkling oasis of charming sidewalk cafes and shopkeepers eager to push their wares. In a city in which everyone smokes and which once was famous for filth, you can’t find a cigarette butt on the streets.

You can nitpick and point out that the vast plaza around the Olympic Stadium is paved mostly in dusty yellow clay instead of the lush green sod that the organizers didn’t have time to lay. And you can talk about the hastily planted trees and ground cover that is already wilting under the hard Peloponnesian sun.

But you can not deny that Athens is ready for what will undoubtedly is a tour de force of an Opening Ceremony, larded with the history and myth, the epic and allegory, of more than 3,000 years of history. And after that, the world is ready for an Olympics whose story line consists of one item: competition.

I had written here, "Let the Games begin," but that’s not quite right. Because there is a different feel here than there has been at any time since I began covering the Olympics in 1984 in Los Angeles, perhaps a different feeling than at any Games since 1972, when terrorism struck Munich and everything changed forever.

For all the Olympiads since, we have gone in worried about terrorists. Then, in 1980 and 1984, East and West staged dueling boycotts. When the world returned to the Games in 1988, there were still the fears about terrorists and the continuing cold war.

But few people talk about possible attacks here. The Games have not shown up on any of Osama bin Laden’s "Places to Blow Up" lists. Security is not just tighter than Ken Griffey Jr.’s hamstrings, it’s been around so long that few take notice of it. Going through a magnetometer is no longer an annoyance. It’s part of the landscape.

Mike Celizic / NBCSports.com An worker climbs the beam of the Olympic stadium during preparations for Friday's Opening Ceremony.

And so, instead of, "Let the Games begin," let’s instead say, "Let the Games return."

Let the competition among nations, the meeting of the elite in sports both famous and obscure, the battle for slugs of plated metal be the reason we are here, the reason we watch, the sole topic of the next 17 days.

And if there is tragedy and controversy, let it be about the Games, and not about everything that surrounds them.

Let it be the devastating tragedy that Greece awoke to this morning. Not a story of a collapsing roof or of a plot to attack, but a human tragedy of a hero struck down, a tragedy that Aeschylus would understand.

The news, broadcast nonstop Thursday night and splashed in great headlines across the morning papers, was that Konstantino Kenteris, the greatest Greek athlete and the first Greek since 1896 to win a gold medal in track, had failed to take a mandatory drug test and then had crashed his motorcycle, injuring himself and his passenger, Katherina Thanou.

Kenteris came from nowhere in 2000 to win gold in the 200 meters. Thanou, who trains with him, took silver in the 100. The last time a Greek had won anything related to speed of foot was in the first Olympics, when a shepherd, Spiridon Louis, won the first Olympic marathon in this very city.

It is impossible to compare Kenteris to any American athlete or superstar of any stripe, because the United States has so many heroes. Greece had one – Kenteris. You’d have to roll up every great American one-name athlete – Tiger, Jordan, Venus, Bonds, Mia, Montana, and more – and you’d be getting close. But you still wouldn’t have Kenteris.

Rumors were everywhere that he had been chosen to light the torch to begin the Games. That won’t happen and the organizers will probably say they never intended to use him, but few will believe it. He is Greek athletics. Because of the missed drug test, he faced probably suspension from the games.

On the news reports, children wept when talking about him. Newspapers demanded that he tell the nation the truth. And he, like famous athletes everywhere, was unavailable for comment.

In a way, another tale of suspected drug use should no longer damage the Olympic image. If anything, the drug testers this year have retaken a measure of initiative in what will forever be a battle between cheaters and detectives.

The United States team has already lost a number of members to the lords of the test tubes, including Tim Montgomrey, the world record holder in the 100 meters, and Torri Edwards, the women’s world champion in the same distance. And Marion Jones, sprinter, long-jumper, and winner of five medals in Sydney, remains under suspicion and investigation.

Cheating scandals are not pleasant. But at least they are part of the games. Athletes cheated in the ancient Olympics, and, when caught, were fined and suspended. The fines paid for statues of gods and heroes. And plaques were erected detailing the iniquities of the miscreants. Perhaps we should do the same with their descendants today.

There will be more. That is pretty much guaranteed. But there is a feeling that fewer are getting through the tests, that the games are being flushed of chemicals. It will never be complete, but it is better than it ever was.

And so, it is time for the athletes to parade through cascades of cheers and storms of strobes, for Greece to tell its story with lights and pyrothechnics, for someone to light the torch, for competition – and just competition – to be the story of an Olympics.

Let the Games return.

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