And so, the Goodwill Games are done.

While they may not have been the financial boom for Nassau County that public officials contended they would be, having attended several events over the past two weeks, I was continually struck by the same notion -- what a fine example for young people these games were.

During the fifteen day event, which transpired at three separate venues here in Nassau, as well as on Staten Island and in Manhattan, we saw about 30 different competitions in just a shade less than half of all the sports competed in.

These included track and field, synchronized swimming, diving, gymnastics, and figure skating, none of which we'd ever covered before in any depth, and all of which had their exciting and crowd pleasing moments.

Though the attendance at many of these events was meager, it was heartening to see the number of kids and teens in the crowd.

Here, competing in our own backyard, were young adults and young people, much like themselves -- even in the case where the athletes were from lands far from our own.

Never during the competition, did our young people ever witness the kind of bad-spiritedness that sometimes manifests itself in sporting events here.

No, what they saw instead in young competitors that could well have been a mirror reflection of themselves, were success-oriented individuals who tried their best and didn't complain when their best resulted in something less than a gold medal finish.

I myself, on occasion, in the throes of my own career, sometimes fall prey to that "nothing matters but winning, being the best" mind-set, and what I've found is that the loss of equilibrium, the losing sight of what's really, really important, is an empty and disheartening experience.

Too often in American sports and American life, for that matter, we've gotten away from the virtues of how "the game" is played, and forgotten that the real satisfaction in life is trying your best in every endeavor.

The competitors that came here from Russia, China, France, the Ukraine, Great Britain, Kenya, Canada, and our very own U.S. of A, among other places, all arrived in Nassau having made significant sacrifices to their respective sports, having committed themselves to something bigger than they are, and tried, when it mattered to be their personal best, whether or not that meant they'd be the best in any given situation on any given day.

Funnily enough, covering the Games, I kind of lost sight of the lesson the athletes had to teach me for awhile. Toward the end, I became rabid in my desire to wrench another story out of the event.

Despite the fact that I'd spent many an hour at the games, I somehow convinced myself that I needed to do more, I needed to do more interviews, I needed to get not one, but three more stories or else I'd wind up as some kind of failure.

When I actually stopped to think about that over this past weekend, I realized how stupid I had been, how much I had missed the point that I'm talking to you about now.

Because I hadn't answered every single question I had in my own mind about the Games, I had come -- for no logical reason -- to feel like a slacker.

How dumb. And yet I did, ultimately learn a valuable lesson from these athletes:

Saying "I've done my best and that's all I can do" is never an admission of defeat; it's the phrase that sums up the very best in the human experience.

Daniel J. McCue