So, turns out I can feel this sense of “we shall never pass this way again” even at an Olympics I did not cover.

I did 13 of these from start to finish, and I guarantee that nearly every journalist at an Olympics reaches a point, usually no later than the middle Sunday, when he or she thinks: “My God; this will never end.”

Remember, for most everybody, even the star columnists and elite talking heads, the Olympics is a grind. Day after day, more and more stuff, new events every four years, always pushing on to the last event of the night and then the first event in the morning, and these are sports nearly every journalist there barely understands, truth be told, and that is wearing, too. Faking expertise.

It is exhausting. Even Olympics enthusiasts start counting down the days.

But then you get to the last Sunday, and the Closing Ceremonies are a few hours away, and the volunteers start to get hinky and giddy and stop manning their posts, and someone breaks out the booze … and the media center starts to thin out, and sometimes this or that office is already being broken down for packing.

And the sense of future nostalgia pretty much grabs you by the throat, and it turns into a sense of sadness and loss.

And of all sports events … only the Olympics really generates that.

No one who has covered more than a couple of Olympics goes to the Closing Ceremonies. If you watched the closing at Sochi tonight, really watched it, you know why.

It’s the party after the party. The one you really don’t need to go to. Nothing important is going to happen.

As an event, it’s always obtuse. Opaque. Moreso than opening, absolutely, because opening is always about delivering a message. Always.

Closing is just letting the auteurs run free — which is fine, in theory, but can make for a tedious three hours for those of us of a less lofty artistic bent.

Singers and dancers, bustling about, clowns and stilt-walkers (aren’t there always stilt-walkers?), some famous musician playing All Night Long.

(No, really. Lionel Richie. Closing at Los Angeles, 1984. The man sang All Night Long forever. I left after 30 minutes of it, because I couldn’t take it anymore. That may have been the last closing I attended in person. It should have been.)

If you see the athletes, at closing, they have lost the regimentation that made them elite athletes, and they have become a galumphing mob. Because this is it. This will never happen again. I will never see any of you again. Though the athletes probably are too young to grasp that.

I have written about this before. While at the event.

I didn’t think I would feel it via television.

So many things in life happen, and we say, “I could always go back and do that again.” Even if it’s massively unlikely and perhaps impossible.

You can always cover another Super Bowl. You can always return to Paris. You can always go to a high school reunion.

Or so we think. It’s comforting, in a way.

But you can’t make that argument for an Olympics. They are one-time events. One-offs, as the Brits say.

Sochi is not hosting the Olympics again in any of our lifetimes. And even if it somehow happened, in 2066, it wouldn’t have Bode Miller and Kim Yu-na. It wouldn’t have Vladimir Putin sitting in a luxury box and glowing or glowering.

I suppose, end of the day, it’s about our mortality. We can fool ourselves into thinking this or that can happen again, but really it won’t … and an Olympics being taken apart as you send your last lonely dispatches … it’s sad and it is a sadness you cannot escape or ignore.

Sochi is finished, and many of us would have welcomed that, a week ago, but we all regret it now. Even after watching Closing Ceremonies from Abu Dhabi.