Nothing taxes sports journalists the way an Olympics does. Nothing. The Super Bowl, Final Four, World Series, World Cup … none of them compare.

The Olympics lasts seemingly forever — three weeks, counting the run-up to Opening.

It’s results, results, results everydamnday — no days off for travel, or rest, whatever.

It’s enormous — 302 gold medals are handed out.

The Olympics exhausts writers in the field and it nearly kills editors and designers back in the office. It’s just a brutal grind.

And, if anything, the level of difficulty, in making sense of this for readers, is going up.

Because … 1) staffs are shrinking everywhere and 2) the imperative to post early and often for the web is the proverbial straw on the back of the sports journalism camel. Those 15- and 16-hour days become something more like 20-hour days.

(I was whining about three straight nights of five-or-less hours of sleep, and another veteran reporter I know said, “I’d kill for five hours of sleep.”)

Thus, mostly everyone is jubilant to get out the back end of an Olympics alive. And I’m one of those people.

Except … that the end of an Olympics also is a melancholy affair.

The Olympics, any Olympics, always strikes me as a particularly fragile and finite point in history. I’ve been thinking that at the end of almost all of the 13 Olympics I covered. (Aside, perhaps, from Sarajevo, which I was genuinely happy to escape.)

So many people work so hard to prepare for those 17 days … and when it goes down, it’s exhilarating and exasperating and a giant pain, and frustrating … but one thing for sure?

You know you’re alive.

You’re running on adrenaline, running to catch a bus, make a deadline. When you’re in the venue, you’re absorbing some foreign culture through your pores (because you don’t always have time to study it).

And when it’s over … that relief gives way to … “we’ll never pass this way again.”

Many of us, most of our lives, always figure we can go back and do something again. Take that trip again, remarry, go back to school, mend that friendship.

We in sports are particularly persistent peddlers of this line of thinking. “Wait till next year!” is a way of life, in sports.

But it doesn’t apply for Olympics.

All of this … all these people, all this stuff … it will never be this way again. It’s a one-shot deal, it will never be reconstructed. We sure as heck won’t be doing this again next year.

The idea of all that makes me melancholy. It seems a bit like death. Even if the life we led was grand and glorious.

The finality of it makes me feel … helpless. It makes me want to look around one more time, and try to print these visions onto my brain. The venue, the athlete, the press room. Because all we have now are memories.