This is an opinion column.

I chart time in Olympic moments. A lot of us do.

Black Power in ‘68. The hostage crisis in Munich in ‘72. Critical, telling moments.

Mark Spitz and that mustache brought on the ‘70s. Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10 in ‘76 made us appreciate greatness beyond the red, white and blue. The Miracle on Ice in ‘80 made us scream for the home team.

U-S-A! U-S-A!

Mary Lou Retton was the sweetheart I needed in ‘84. Jackie Joyner-Kersee and FloJo were strength and grace in the amazing ‘88 games.

I was working a night shift that year, covering a big news event in woods north of Birmingham when the U.S. lost to the Soviets in men’s basketball. To be honest I don’t recall if it was a plane crash or a search for a missing person. They run together. But I remember standing in a parking lot, listening to the radio with a team of EMTs as America fell, forever changing the way we played that game.

The Olympics marks our times. Our culture. Our changes and revolutions.

The ‘92 Olympics, thanks to that loss to the Russians, gave us the first Dream Team, the real Dream Team, with Jordan and Magic and Leeds’ own Charles Barkley, who elbowed a guy in the chest in the Olympic games, of all places. That Charles.

In ‘96 the Summer Games came to The South, to Atlanta, with soccer matches played right here in Birmingham. Maybe it wasn’t an iconic moment to the world when American Claudio Reyna scored in the opening moments of a match against huge favorite Argentina – the U.S. would ultimately lose – but it was iconic to me. Then a bomb went off in Centennial Park in Atlanta, and I will never forget the feeling that something had been stolen. We didn’t know it was serial bomber Eric Rudolph at the time. Just that a madman took something beautiful and blew it up. As madmen tend to do.

I’ve always been transfixed by the Games, by the spectacle, by the athletes and conversations. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Usain Bolt and Apolo Ohno and Simone Biles and Michael Phelps. Katie freaking Ledecky. Carl Lewis. Wow.

I revere the greatness, and admire the work it takes to become the best. I appreciate how hard it can be to hold on to success, especially when you come to expect it. The current Olympics, with Auburn’s Suni Lee and Mobile’s Paige Madden as heroes, might have made me appreciate the Games more than ever before. Because I realize now, perhaps more than ever before, what I love most about the Olympics.

It is not the wins or losses, the record times or even the remarkable feats. It’s not the blowouts or the comebacks – like the stunning one by the Netherlands’ Femke Bol to beat the U.S. in the mixed relay last week. It is not the touching stories of beating the odds, like Noah Lyles overcoming asthma to become the world’s fastest man. It is not the familiar connections – how Dennis Rodman’s daughter Trinity, with pink hair of her own, saved the day for the U.S. women’s soccer team over the weekend.

It is that the Olympics, in a world so fragmented we often share little but animosity and anger, focuses attention on one special place, on values that might have seemed a given in another age but seem pretty critical now: Excellence, respect and friendship.

We tend to be more insulated in a world filled with AI explanations of human reality, with countless streaming options and cable news networks’ decidedly different understandings of the nature of facts. We are more culturally isolated in a time when music and ads are curated for us by algorithms. In a world spewing information, it is harder to define popular culture, if there even is one. It is harder to find community conversation.

So I am reminded, by Biles and Lyles and the others, how this thing we think of as a sporting event has marked the passage of our lives, and our times.

I appreciate these Games more than ever. And all that came before. Not just for the sports, but for the camaraderie and common ground we find when we watch together.

We can celebrate the wins and mourn the losses. It’s not important that we root for the same team. But it’s important that we experience the same game.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.