From our long-running Jason Gay Ol’ Time series

The five-ring monte game that Store 2024 ran in Boston this past year has, mercifully, come to an end.

And Boston native Jason Gay gave it a proper burial in his Wall Street Journal column yesterday.

Boston Says ‘Nope’ to 2024 Games

Boston didn’t want the Summer Olympics. OK, that is not totally accurate: Some Bostonians were excited for the city to host the Summer Games in 2024, just not enough of them to, you know, give the idea popular momentum. Boston never became gripped with Olympic fever, not even close. It mostly acted like the Olympics were a two-week canoe trip with their in-laws that they would get stuck paying for.

As someone who grew up a few miles outside the city, I’m not totally surprised. Every time I read a story about the Boston Olympics, I kept imagining my late father pacing around the kitchen with a coffee mug, complaining about Olympic budgets and especially Olympic traffic, nine years in advance. People in Boston are really cuckoo about traffic. My dad made it his life’s mission to avoid Boston traffic; he liked to leave for the Logan Airport 13 years in advance of the flight; around the Fourth of July weekend he would wake up in the middle of the night screaming about gridlock on Cape Cod. I won’t even mention parking. Boston parking could actually have been an Olympic event.

Not that Gay wouldn’t have loved to cover the Boston 2024 Olympics: “I am an unabashed fan of the Games, and besides, my co-workers would have been crammed into a discount highway motel eating vending machine sandwiches while I was at my mom’s house sleeping in my childhood bed and eating blueberry pancakes. What wasn’t to like?”

What wasn’t to like, of course, was Boston residents being on the hook for millions of dollars to host a millionairepalooza.

So goodbye Wherever Velodrome, goodbye VIPissYouOff lanes, goodbye John (Go) Fish.

And – oh, yes – good riddance to you all.