As airports go, Albany International is a fairly quaint little joint. It has plenty of carpet, a short walk to the gates, a pub that inexplicably doesn't melt the cheese on its nachos, a meditation room, security personnel not too overworked to be friendly.

On the third floor it has a semi-circular viewing room overlooking the runways and, at the horizon, a wall of trees reminding you the Adirondacks will be waiting if you or your great-great-grandchildren ever decide to come on back.

Nature may be encroaching but don't forget that you are indeed out of the woods — not always a good thing, especially when you're coming off a week in Lake Placid and you forget you're still carrying a pocket knife. A squealing metal detector will jog anyone's memory, though.

Oh, right. That thing. A little Swiss number used mainly for cleaning toenails, cutting stray threads off cheap dress shirts and turning Phillips-head screws.

Step aside, please. Out comes the metal-detecting wand. And then the obligatory pat-down. And then a warning: Take the knife back to your car, or check it in with other luggage or go to the postal drop and mail it to yourself, but under no circumstances come back with it.

Gee, looks like we're re-entering the real world. Back in Lake Placid, a Swiss pocket knife is about as menacing as Swiss Miss. Back in Lake Placid, there were shotguns, arrows, chainsaws assembled from guts of motocross bikes, axes sharp enough to come from Gillette, Big Air dogs snarling at each other and their owners nearly joining them.

In the Speed Climbing event, men scaled a 65-foot pole and then plunged down; one fellow in near free-fall caught his 1 ½-inch aluminum spur in his leg and his wrist, slashing an artery. He went to the hospital and was back that afternoon to watch the finals, iodine still blotched yellow around the bandages on his arm.

Pull this puny red knife out at the Great Outdoor Games and people assume you're offering them a toothpick. Do so at the airport, and people assume you haven't read a newspaper in the last year.

How curious that a week running around a mountain outpost like Lake Placid, and watching athletes obliterate targets, logs and world records, is escapist. The thing that makes the Great Outdoor Games so Great is that they are indeed Outdoors, and the Games are just survival, timed and scored. Sports based on work. Athletes who actually work in mills and carving up trees. You start to wonder which realm is actually "the real world."

Imagine what the Great Indoor Games would require. Receptionists and accountants and middle-managers competing to determine the fastest at transferring calls, typing memos, stapling reports, making decent coffee without a filter. The winners get to knock off an hour early.

White-collar jobs have their advantages, true, but they make for absolutely stultifying viewing. Leaving a weekend of running, rolling, chopping, sawing, climbing, jumping, shooting and so forth, and heading back to the designated real world — that of saving ATM receipts and yelling at traffic jams and unjamming copiers and hunting lost remotes and clipping coupons for aspirin — you wonder what we give up when we move out of the woods.

Not surprising that people come out of the woodwork to go back now and again. It's cool to climb trees, to play with your dog, to catch fish. People being people, we still want to know who's doing it best. The Great Outdoor Games shows us exactly who is. Turns out that often as not, it's someone with far more upper-body strength than attitude. Sports based on work apparently don't inflate egos, especially when there's no boss to impress but oneself.

The knife, incidentally, got mailed, priority rate, on its way to Arkansas wrapped in a map of Albany International Airport and jammed in an envelope provided by the sympathetic women at the information desk. Seriously, airports don't come much friendlier.

Posted near the X-ray machine back towards the terminal stood a young security guard with a blue necktie stuck on the side of his collar, just dangling there.

He was told his tie looked ready to clip itself off.

"I unbuttoned the collar," he said. "It was killing my neck."

Amen, brother. But you know, the tie's hanging off to the side like a busted window shutter.

"It's a clip-on," he said.

Funny, hadn't noticed.

But there's a potential Great Indoor Game for you: quick-buttoning your collar and straightening your tie when the supervisor comes around. Winners could get a 15-minute smoke break and a cubicle by the window.