I wanted to get a ticket for the U.S.-Spain semifinal men's football match Tuesday night. The U.S. team had never gotten this far in Olympic competition, and being a moderately big soccer fan I wanted to go down to Moore Park and cheer the boys on. I didn't have a ticket -- the ducat I was holding was for boxing, which I was eminently prepared to unload. From what I remembered of Olympic boxing, it consisted of two guys armored like Tweedledum and Tweedledee jabbing away ineffectually at each other, under the eye of judges whose ethical role model was the Claude Rains character in "Casablanca." This year, we were assured that to eliminate the nagging "your winnings, excellency" problem in the judging, the judges' electronic scoring would be checked against the fight. And Don King has found God. Whatever.

I found a miraculously short ticket line outside the gymnastics venue and jumped in. (Logistically, they've handled everything perfectly at these Games except ticket sales -- people are waiting in line for hours at understaffed booths at Olympic Park to buy tickets, often to discover when they get to the window that the event they want is sold out. One man standing in front of me became so enraged he smashed the wall with his hand.) But I was informed that they didn't have any and I'd have to go down to the venue before the game. So an hour and a half before the match was due to start I jumped on my bike and rode through the drizzling dusk -- the capricious Sydney spring has gone from glorious sun the first week to cold and rain for the last four days -- in the general direction of the Sydney Football Stadium.

When I got there after an involuntary tour of some of Sydney's less-glamorous districts, not quite wet to the bone, I started heading for the ticket booth, but was stopped by two shy teenage girls who wanted to know if I needed a ticket. They had five and couldn't use them. Just then one of the ubiquitous Olympic volunteers came over, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman. There are something like 40,000 of these folks all over Sydney, all unpaid, wearing their blue and yellow uniforms and hats and handling everything from transportation advice to foreign translating, and every one of them is helpful and cheery. This one was the one exception.

"Are you selling tickets?" she squawked at the girls. "You can't do that. You'll have to leave."

Even I knew this was a crock. This is a virulently anti-scalper Games, but of course they're not worried about people selling their tickets at face value. I myself had wandered up and down the main boulevard in Olympic Park yelling "Who needs a badminton ticket?" and no gendarmes had hauled me off. Besides, you only had to look at these girls to know they weren't scalpers. Scalpers as a rule bear a strong resemblance to the acid-throwing Pinkie in Graham Greene's "Brighton Rock" -- they're ferret-faced denizens of the ninth circle of hell. These girls, on the other hand, looked like they'd have trouble getting up enough nerve to sell lemonade at a street stand. Somehow, this woman had failed to grasp that they were not the bad guys.

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