One hundred days hence, something big is happening in this country.

Perhaps you have heard about it.

That's one thing very different this time around, the third occasion on which the Olympic colossus has touched down in Canada. The build-up, the hype, the stoked expectations, were not of this magnitude in 1976, or even in 1988.

Different times, different world, different scale of media machinery - unprecedented, that last part, and perhaps never to be duplicated - have transformed the lead up to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

There was certainly plenty of giddy expectation back when, the nervousness that goes with hosting a party and not knowing in the minutes before anyone arrives quite how it is going to pan out.

This, though, is something else again, months upon months of updates, athletes who would normally be obscure before a Games begin turned into household names, warm-and-fuzzy backstories told that would normally only be trotted out after a medal is won, and a continuing debate about how we're going to do, what it's all going to mean, whether we are really a win-at-whatever-cost culture - and in the past year or so, also the natural, lingering doubts about pulling it all off in the teeth of a global economic meltdown.

Normally, right about now in the Olympic cycle, folks would be just beginning to turn their attention briefly away from the professional team sports that dominate the calendar and considering how they might be spending the better part of February.

This time, unless they've stubbornly been averting their eyes and plugging their ears, they know what day the women's luge runs are taking place, and who they ought to watch for, in addition to a whole host of biographical details about our own predesignated heroes.

But here's an interesting thing.

The difference between sport and theatre, between sport and the movies, between real sport and professional wrestling, is you can't script the outcome. Happy endings, big finishes, emotional payoffs are delivered all the time, which is a big part of the pleasure, but they are never guaranteed, never preordained.

Thinking back on past Olympics, so much that characterized them, for better or for worse, came as an absolute surprise.

No one knew before the 1976 Montreal Games that boxer Sugar Ray Leonard would tape his girlfriend's picture to his sock, that they'd have to import snow for the 1988 Calgary opening ceremonies, that Lillehammer in 1994 would be a place filled with small, subtle, organic cultural delights, that Seoul in 1988 would be remembered almost entirely for doping, or that a bomb set by a religious fanatic - and the false accusation of someone else - would completely sink the 1996 Atlanta Games.

Stuff happens, and stuff will happen in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C., in 2010.

Given the amount of money invested in our athletes, it's a pretty sure thing that some of those pre-Games prognostications will come true, that Canada for the first time will win gold on home soil, and finish near the top of the overall medal table.

What is going to make or break these Games though, even with all of the advance notice, is beyond knowing right now.

Will Vancouverites be the same kind of warm, homey hosts Calgarians were in '88, or has too much cynicism about the Olympic business crept into the mix? Will the 2010 organizers be able to manage the delicate balance between running an orderly event and the inevitable and necessary dissent? Is it possible with so much having been said and written and broadcast already, that the great shining moment will still come out of the blue - like a coach from a rival team handing a racer a ski pole to replace one that had just broken?

We have absorbed more information farther in advance about these Olympic Games and the participants than ever before, and from here the drumbeat only gets louder.

But when the curtain goes up, when the cauldron is lit, there is still going to be that jolt, happy or otherwise, that this is the real thing and not just the intimations.

And however often they have offered glimpses of the script, no one really knows the climax until the credits roll.