THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Thursday, Aug. 18, 2016

Twenty years ago — a few nights before the bomb went off — I watched the riveting finale of the Olympic women’s gymnastics team competition on TV at my sister’s house in suburban Atlanta as the clock ticked toward midnight.

The Magnificent Seven was trying to win the gold medal, and sleep could wait.

“You can do it, Kerri,” USA women’s gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi implored to Kerri Strug, who was limping after suffering what would turn out to be two torn ligaments in her ankle in a rough landing on her first vault attempt.

We know what happened after that — Strug summoned up the courage for a second vault, and stuck the landing in heroic fashion. The USA won the gold, and Karolyi carried the ailing Strug around in his arms during the medal ceremony.

Only two problems with that:

One, as it turned out, the USA didn’t really need her second vault — they already had enough points for the victory.

And two, the competition had actually taken place several hours before — taped and neatly packaged to be shown in prime time on NBC.

By the time the USA women were shown celebrating on TV, the team members had long gone home to bed, after, as the story goes, celebrating their gold medal hours earlier at Planet Hollywood in Atlanta, then later that night with Shaq and other members of the Dream Team.

TWENTY YEARS later, NBC still does the same thing to us.

They take the most heart-tugging moments of the day, set them up with an touching feature, then show them later that night as if they were happening live.

Sort of a greatest hits album.

But it’s OK.

It’s not ideal, but with the evolution of the internet since then, there are ways to get around having to wait for NBC to tell us what happened. You can watch the events live on your computer or mobile device, and with the advent of Twitter, if you really want to know what happened exactly when it happened, you can.

Twenty years ago, the Olympics were shown on one channel, events to be shown on NBC whenever it wanted — or not at all, if there wasn’t room. At least now, with the NBC “family of networks,” there’s pretty much a channel for every sport, most of it live.

And, later that night, even if you already knew the outcome, you could still enjoy Michael Phelps and Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky winnning gold after gold after gold — without the stress of sweating out each event.

YOU DO have to give the Olympic organizers credit — they go out of their way to make the games bright and cheery looking.

Look at the colors they use — pink and orange and yellow and lime green and light blue and stuff like that. If nothing else, it makes for a more joyous atmosphere.

Compare that to the colors they used on the basketball courts for the NCAA tournament a few years ago — blue, with a touch of black, or black, with a touch of blue. Plus black curtains. Talk about a grim, lifeless setting.

Not sure who decided what bright color would look next to what bright color at the Olympics, but kudos to them.

If you took some of those crazy colors and tried to match your shirt and pants to them, you’d likely get laughed at and sent home from work, but those colors seem to be OK in the Olympics.

If you painted your house with those colors, the neighbors would toilet paper your front yard.

EVEN AFTER all these years, the Olympics still bring out the emotion in us.

We share the excitement as well as the disappointment — even sometimes when we already know the outcome.

Sometimes we shed a tear when they play the Star-Spangled Banner during the medal ceremony — we envision ourselves up on the medal stand after winning the gold, though what event we could possibly win at that level is hard to fathom, even fantasizing. Bacon eating, perhaps?

Even some of the multi-millionaire athletes seem to be into the Olympic spirit, checking out the other events, just like the regular folks who have to go back to work after the Games are over.

The darn media scares us before the Games, saying the water in Rio is worse than the stuff you have pumped out of your septic tank every few years. And beware some spider-like thing that could keep you from having kids someday, should you so desire.

But once the Games begin, most of that negative stuff is forgotten, we keep tuning in, shockingly bright colors and all.

Even when you find out later a bomb went off in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta roughly 90 minutes after you walked through there, and you spend the next day with a knot in your stomach, wondering what’s going to happen the next time, you eventually go back to the park, and go back to tuning in.

We don’t mind tiny doses of badminton, field hockey and table tennis, stuff we wouldn’t dare watch any other time — much like the intrigue of curling every four years during the Winter Olympics.

We get excited about sports like swimming and gymnastics, get to know the athletes and their stories — then essentially forget about them until the next Olympics.

And then we’ll go through all of these emotions again, in four more years.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.