TORINO -- Say what you will about the brotherhood of man, the spirit of peaceful competition and the Olympic creed, but nothing says we are all one people better than a stadium crowded with 35,000 fans from all over the world joining together in an unprompted "Y-M-C-A" spellout.
In other words, it was another one of those nights Friday at the Opening Ceremony for the XX Winter Olympics.
The Opening Ceremony is always a bit like the Winter Olympics themselves. There are stretches -- such as that whole 12-minute scene from an Italian Renaissance court -- when you're wondering just what the hell it is you're watching and wishing you had worn warmer clothing and hoping that the taps are still open at Austria House when you finally get out of the stadium. And then there moments -- such as when Pavarotti sings Puccini beneath the Olympic cauldron -- that leave you with such a chill not even those cool parkas the Italian team wore would warm you adequately.
Plus, now at least we know what Fellini's work would be like had he chosen pantomime as his medium instead of film.
The purpose of the Opening Ceremony is to bring in all the athletes and light the torch. Unfortunately, each host city has seven years to prepare for this event, which invariably leads to a lot of very bad, overblown ideas. Thus, we had Susan Sarandon (star of "The Banger Sisters") helping to carry in the Olympic flag and Yoko Ono taking the stage to make a global appeal for peace. Yes, Yoko Ono! There she was, the woman who broke up the Beatles, telling the world it should get along better together. What nerve.
But at least Yoko didn't try to sing. The same couldn't be said of Peter Gabriel, who croaked out a version of "Imagine" that left the impression that he just woke up from an all-night bender with Bode Miller.
The selection of Peter Gabriel was puzzling -- what, Toto was booked? -- but even that wasn't as bewildering as each country marching into the stadium with disco music blaring over the loudspeakers. John Lennon challenged us to "imagine there's no countries." I ask you to imagine Ethiopia's two athletes walking into the stadium while Donna Summer sings "Hot Stuff."
Hey, Italy, you're the land of opera, the home of Verdi and Puccini. Heck, you gave us an opera about a train, for crying out loud. You can do better than KC and the Sunshine Band.
In the end, though, the night wasn't about the music or the prolonged costumed history of Italian culture, it was about the athletes who will command our attention for the next two weeks. The Italians had the best coats (they ought to, Milan is only 90 miles away), the Mongolians had the best hats (the Water Buffalo Lodge called to say they want them back) and Brazil had the most colorful design.
Torino, meanwhile, had the best flame, with a pyrotechnic lighting of the cauldron that made all the previous disco music and bizarre dances worth enduring. Skier Stefania Belmondo began the lighting by lowering the torch, setting off a series of fireworks that swirled the stadium and eventually lit the cauldron as goosebumps everywhere swelled like the Alps.
"Whenever I watched the Olympics," U.S. ice dancer Tanith Belbin said, "I would think, 'If I could just go to the opening ceremonies, if I could just march in with everyone. ...'"
She did Friday, along with 2,500 athletes from 80 countries, including North and South Korea. The two Koreas will compete as different countries at these Games, but they marched in under one flag. It's a start.
"Our world today is in need of peace, tolerance and brotherhood," IOC president Jacques Rogge said. "The values of the Olympic Games can deliver these to us."
Maybe he's right. After all, if the Olympics can give us Pavarotti and the Village People, nothing is impossible.
Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.