New York weeps today.
Yeah, right.
More likely, New York is chanting, "Rog-ge Stinks! Rog-ge Stinks!" Or even likelier, New York is doing nothing whatsoever.
The 2012 Olympics are not coming to America. If George Steinbrenner fires his bullpen coach, that gets the back page. It always has, it always will, and no amount of synchronized swimming is going to change that.
Of course, some New Yorkers -- Mayor Michael (I Need Me A Legacy) Bloomberg, for one -- were disappointed by IOC President Jacques Rogge's announcement Wednesday that London will host the 2012 Games. London, which also hosted the Olympics in 1908 and 1948, edged Paris in the final round of voting. Other cities eliminated were Moscow, New York and Madrid.
But most New Yorkers could give about 1/40th of a damn, because they've already got well, New York.
They've got the Yankees and Giants, the Jets and Mets, the Rangers and Knicks, the Nets (soon enough, anyway), and a representative in every niche sport there is. New York has the U.S. Open in tennis. It has screaming, howling, swearing, irrational nutcase fans in every sport. It has screaming, howling, swearing, irrational nutcase newspapers, too, and radio chat-show loons, and television blockheads, and all of them believe they are in the dead center of the solar system.
The Olympics? Please. Don't bother them with the small stuff.
Wednesday's IOC selection show had all the requisite fake drama but didn't even have the added benefit of taking 30 minutes, as does the NCAA Tournament selection show. New York's defeat was thoroughly expected.
So what hurts? A bunch of yahoos in blazers telling you your town isn't good enough to beat London? That's pretty much it.
But one of the things that makes New York New York is its amazing ability to consider itself the center of the universe even when someone says it isn't. New Yorkers are utterly unburdened by the onus of humility. Wednesday's decision has already been turned into New York's rejection of the Olympics, not the other way around.
Oh, the tabloids will fake outrage if nothing better comes along, with headlines such as "Five Rings, One Middle Finger."
Other media reports will be far more mournful, bemoaning New York's status in the world. But that's for some journalism roundtable that none of us have the stomach to endure.
The fact remains that New York will still act like New York. It will miss the Olympics in no discernible way whatsoever, for the simple reason that there's no novelty here.
New York already has every country in the world represented, so the Kazakh weight lifter, the Nigerian boxer and the Chilean archer all already have countrymen working in the city's bodegas, banks or the Port Authority.
In fact, if it wasn't for the stadium problems that helped seal New York's fate, nobody in New York would have anything at stake here -- except Bloomberg. We will now pause while we consider this political body blow. OK, feel better?
Maybe New York's chances would have been enhanced under the old IOC rules, in which delegates basically walked through City Hall with a shopping cart. In the good old days, in a world populated by glad-handers, gear-greasers and bribe-vendors, New York could have been the planetary leader.
But because the IOC delegates could no longer visit a competing city (or maybe because they've already been to New York plenty of times), New York was considered only slightly better than Moscow, and nowhere close to the winner.
Were politics involved? Of course they were, and the U.S. of A. isn't all that popular a place across the world right now.
Were petty jealousies involved? No question. America got the summer Olympics in Atlanta and Winter Games in Salt Lake City in the last decade, and Olympic internationalists tend to consider that excessive even by American standards.
Mostly, though, this was the right result if only because New York doesn't need the Olympics the way London does. Oh, politicians, corporate types and people who live in the Hamptons and want to rent out their cottages for three weeks at $10,000 a day do. But politics, business and people who live in the Hamptons and want to rent out their cottages for three weeks at $3,500 a day will go on even without the Olympics.
And the IOC needs to see some love, not just some like. They need needing.
Otherwise, the delegates can't be the collection of self-important, bloviating gasbags so many of them are.
Besides, there's always 2016. You see, this is the civic goat-rope that never ends, because unlike the Super Bowl, which is awarded to cities based solely on the owner's proximity to Paul Tagliabue, the IOC likes it when cities step up again and again to offer a piece of the action.
And no town knows action quite like New York.
Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com