A few days after Toronto won its bid for the 2015 Pan American Games, a letter to the editor appeared in The Globe and Mail. Written by a man named Tim Jeffery, it asked a sensible question: “Why does it take the Pan American Games to build amateur athletic facilities, affordable housing and transit upgrades that Canada’s largest city has sorely needed for decades?” Mr. Jeffery’s query seemed more rhetorical than inquisitive. What he wanted to make clear was that the $1.4‑billion budget for the two-week event had miraculously materialized from coffers that, until then, had been as chronically unfilled as a Toronto pothole.

He put his finger on the odd way that civil societies work in the post-Mont­real, post-L.A., post-Barcelona, post-Sydney, post-Beijing world. What is it about an Olympics-like event that suddenly makes possible things that somehow were impossible before? An aquatics centre, a velodrome, two 50-metre 10-lane pools, and an athletes’ village in the West Don Lands (to name but a few of the items on the winning bid’s proposal) were suddenly staring at a green light. Other projects, like a desperately needed rail link to the airport and regular GO Train service to Hamilton, became instant priorities. Supporters of the Pan Am Games promise that once the athletes pack up and leave, we’ll end up with all their new facilities to enjoy for ourselves, and the athletes’ village can become much needed affordable housing.

Lurking behind the Pan Am Games is the monstrous shadow of the Olympics, and since people don’t tend to have strong feelings about the former, they borrow from their suspicion of the latter to predict what lies in store for Toronto in 2015: massive cost overruns, traffic nightmares and unrealistic hopes of long-term sustainability. And while the games’ supporters envision enormous bene­fits, it’s worth remembering that Winnipeg has twice hosted the Pan Am Games—in 1967 and in 1999. And Winnipeg is still Winnipeg.

Mr. Jeffery’s letter puts him in the camp of the suspicious, a position that can be summarized in three words: Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. When money appears out of nowhere, as if by hocus-pocus, the grandstanding politicians and the puffed-up champions of an Olympic bid are usually safely ensconced in comfortable retirement by the time taxpayers have to pick up the tab.

But Olympics hating is out of fashion these days. As crowds of wholesome souls gather on sidewalks to cheer on the trans-Canada torch relay, critics have been reduced, in the public imagination, to clusters of gloomy protesters who wouldn’t know fun if it bit them on the soles of their Birkenstocks. The Olympics remain popular even in their current bombastic, hyper-televised, cloyingly sentimental and fatuously nationalistic guise. That’s how things work in what surely will be known to future historians as the Age of Spectacle. Asking why the Olympics are so popular is as futile as asking why Cirque du Soleil and U2 are popular. They just are. Possibly, years from now, people will look back at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Games, or The Edge’s guitar solos, or contor­tionists hanging from the rafters in banners of red silk with the same bemusement with which we now view Esther Williams’s movies or Mussolini’s architecture. Was there really a time, people may well wonder, when all this grandiosity was taken seriously?