Day 312: The Olympics are Here! The Olympics are Here!

Can you tell I'm just a little bit excited about the start of the Sochi Olympic Games? It's what will keep me going now that football is over. Well, the Olympics and the fact that pitchers and catchers report next Saturday, but mostly the Olympics. Hey... it's only happens once every four years, right? I can get excited if I want.

This year, those tricky Olympics organizers are throwing us a bit of a curve ball. While the official Opening Ceremonies for the games are Friday night, they've really already started with a few events on Thursday. There will be preliminary rounds of Slope Style Snowboarding Qualification (a new, and very dynamic event), Freestyle Skiing Qualification (women's moguls) and Team Figure Skating (huh? there wasn't enough skating already?)

Unfortunately, pretty much everything that NBC shows us will be tape-delayed because Sochi is nine hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, so that just makes it impossible for the events televised in primetime to actually be live. You know what this means, don't you? It means either you stream it over the interwebs (at work! gasp!) to see it when it happens, or you avoid all world wide web contact for the entire day so you don't see the results. Click HERE for the TV schedule.

It also means that every single news report about the Olympics will be prefaced with the whole "spoiler alert" speech and everyone will be diving for their remote control mute button. Or you can just do what I do—stick your fingers in your ears and start singing "la-la-la-la-la" as loud as you can so as not to hear anything those evil spoiler newspeople are trying to tell you.

NBC received tons 'o flack for its tape-delayed 2012 London games. The time difference that summer also forced the network to delay broadcasting events, but it also gave them the opportunity to edit the primetime programming and include all those feel good stories that usually have me sobbing uncontrollably. And even though many took to social media to complain about it, it didn't seem to hurt the viewership. The London Summer Olympics earned record numbers when 219.4 million people tuned in to watch.

Let's just hope there are no major flubs with the network giving away the results accidentally. Sort of like the Missy Franklin gold medal mishap when just seconds before her final in the 100-meter backstroke, NBC ran a promo featuring Franklin as a newly crowned gold medalist. D'oh. Major head-desk for the moron who let that happen.

I think what I need to do in order to remain stress-free throughout the next 17 days is to just accept that with the speed information travels these days, I'm going to get spoiled on some events. I'm pretty sure it won't be the end of the world. And while it sucks to know the results before the event, it will still be fun to watch.

Can someone please remind me of this new philosophy when I'm spouting off like a crazy person on Facebook in a couple days?

USA! USA! USA!