The Mag's Anne Marie Cruz has survived a mind-numbing plane trip and a modem-numbing laptop crash. This is her first dispatch from Sydney.

Let's get one thing straight: I did not schlep halfway around the world to complain. (To giggle at how the water swirls the wrong way down the drain, maybe.) But Lordy be, it's FUH-REE-ZING here. Granted, I am the ultimate cold-weather wuss-ask anyone who's seen me wearing my snowboarding jacket in the office during the summer-but you can see your breath in the motel rooms and the wind has the rainbow lorakeets (bird types Down Under) hanging upside-down off the palm trees. (I'm not kidding.)

Overheard

"No, but there were times I wanted to do judo on him."

-- Judo player Hillary Wolf on whether she took Macaulay Culkin to the mat when she played his sister in Home Alone and Home Alone 2

How this is relevant to your life: The cold and the wind won't be very world-record friendly to the sprinters.

But please don't tell them that. Half of Maurice Greene's HSI crew-Jon Drummond, Inger Miller and Ato Boldon-were on my flight to Oz (along with the U.S. men's volleyball team--business class--and the U.S. fencing team--coach). After we all deplaned from a fourteen-hour, turbulence-addled ride, Sue Hovey (Olympics editor extraordinaire) whipped out a copy of The Mag's Olympics preview for the three speedsters to check out. The pictures alone were enough to get them strutting and talking. It was 7 a.m., but they all could've lined up right then.

I must say that energy is contagious. Even the press conferences are lively because the Olympians are glowing with anticipation. Most of them have just moved into the Village, so it's only starting to sink in. And the more they talk about what they're going to do after the torch is lit, the more real it becomes. So they're even happy to be stuck in rooms with us media folk. Right now everyone's loose--cracking jokes and savoring the last couple days where dreams are still suspended in the realm of the entirely possible. No one's going home. Yet.

And as long I stay bundled in my knit cap with the dark blue llamas on it, neither am I.

Anne Marie Cruz c-c-covers the Olympics for ESPN The Magazine.