Firework displays were banned on Oahu this Fourth of July, but the ocean put on an even better show, as waves with 10-foot faces exploded on the reefs of Oahu’s South Shore.

The swell peaked Monday, too big for me to paddle out; at Suis, my normally crowded home break near Diamond Head, hardly anyone was braving the wind-torn, closeout conditions except a handful of flying groms and well-muscled veterans like my neighbor Fred, who, board under his arm, walked past in the gathering dark with red eyes and a maniacal grin.

At nearby Tonggs, I watched as a slight girl in her early teens, clad in the sort of frumpy, two-piece suit my mother used to make me wear, hauled her board up the steps and told her friends, “I’ve surfed big Tonggs before, but this time, suddenly, I found myself riding straight in towards the Natatorium — the currents pulled me so far, so quick, I didn’t even know it!”

I walked on toward the Natatorium, half a mile away, where even bigger waves were breaking at Castles, offshore of Kaimana Beach Park; they steamrolled down the coast, connecting with the next break, Publics, in a stirring reminder of Duke Paoa Kahanamoku’s historic, mile-long ride across Waikiki on a wave three times as high.

With the first-ever Olympic surfing competition scheduled for July 25-Aug. 1 at Tsurigasaki Surfing Beach, Japan, and Hawaii’s Carissa Moore and John John Florence on the U.S. Olympic team, there’s been a surge of local pride connecting these young Oahu natives with the legacy of Kahanamoku, who won three Olympic gold medals in swimming for the U.S. and is celebrated worldwide as the father and ambassador of modern surfing.

But disappointment also roiled Hawaii surf circles when the International Olympic Committee declined to let Hawaii have its own surf team, or to let Florence and Moore represent the islands in jerseys bearing the Hawaiian rather than the U.S. flag. They and fellow islanders Seth Moniz, Malia Manuel, Coco Ho and others have always done so on the World Surf League championship tour, which Florence has won twice and Moore four times.

Part Native Hawaiian, Moore also recalls Kahanamoku in her modest, gracious comportment and warm smile — as well as her competitive drive. She is viewed by many as his heir, carrying forward the Hawaiian roots, values and supremacy of the evolving sport.

Ultimately, when it comes to surfing, flags and labels don’t matter: Moore and Florence can’t help but represent Hawaii —they were born here, they live here.

Nor can Hawaii, whose indigenous people created surfing, home to a disproportionate number of the world’s most challenging and storied breaks, ever lose that mantle to another place.

And it will have extra visibility in the Olympics, where, although every participating nation is limited to a four-member surf team of two women and two men, Hawaii will have a couple more representatives, albeit surfing under other flags.

Oahu-born Mahina Maeda will be competing on Japan’s Olympic team, and Tatiana Weston-Webb, who was raised on Kauai and still lives there, will be surfing for Brazil, where she happened to be born.

Both these fierce young chargers pack unmistakable Hawaiian chops and style.

There’s something special about surfing on these small islands in the middle of the vast Pacific.

You feel you’re living in the ocean.

“You weren’t at Tonggs, you were at Ricebowls,” a friend told the surfer girl.

No wonder she was swept down the coast: In a big swell with the right direction, Ricebowls, a deepwater break that lies just Ewa and outside of Tonggs, forms one of the fastest, sheerest, heaviest waves on the South Shore.

My little brother Ethan, 55, surfed Ricebowls on Big Monday.

“I had two big lefts, and one free-fall-and-recovery right,” he texted.

I’ve known those rights, the ones that jack up and drop out from under you, launching you through the air to certain doom, and yet sometimes, by some miracle, you land back in the wave and, turning hard, race through, ahead of the crashing curl.

There is a deep mystery to all that power and beauty; in the shadow of a such a wave, you know you’re in the realm of Kanaloa, god of the sea, who knows no boundaries.