I have a pet theory that most Olympics fans are not year-round sports fans, and that lots of sports fan(atic)s do not care about the Olympics at all.

My longtime friend Kara — a huge 49ers and UH fan — takes umbrage with this theory, as she LOVES the Olympics.

My evidence, admittedly, is primarily anecdotal. Most of the friends I see get excited about the Olympics on my social media feeds otherwise never mention sports.

For example, Jamie, a friend since college, recently posted that she’s subscribing to Peacock (NBC’s streaming service) for the month so she can watch more Olympics. I also plan to add Peacock for a month, but it’s so my daughter and I can stream seasons 5 through 8 of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” before she goes back to college.

That’s right, I fall into the latter group from my first sentence. I’m a big football, basketball and baseball fan who does not care about the Olympics. Most of my friends who post about pro sports don’t say boo about the Summer and Winter Games.

Well, this year I plan to put an end to that — or at least to try to. As long as I’m getting Peacock, I figure, why not give the Olympics another shot, see what I’ve been missing. I wasn’t always like this about the Olympics, after all.

Some of my strongest sports memories as a child are from the Olympics. I remember seeing:

>> Mary Lou Retton make history in 1984 (back in the good old days when all Americans could agree that Russia/the U.S.S.R. was the enemy);

>> Katarina Witt and Brian Boitano win gold in figure skating;

>> Greg Louganis bang his head on the diving platform;

>> Carl Lewis become famous enough running track (and jumping … field?) to earn the right to butcher the national anthem.

Even early in adulthood, I watched nearly every minute of The Dream Team’s game- (and globe-) changing run through the 1992 Barcelona Games, and I have some memory of Ukraine’s Oksana Baiul edging lead-pipe cinch Nancy Kerrigan in figure skating in 1994.

Somewhere in the past 30 years, though, I stopped caring about the Olympics beyond what was required to put out a sports section that gave our readers what they need. I admired the results of GOATs like Simone Biles and Michael Phelps, but I rarely watched a second of the actual competition.

So where do I begin as I dive back in this year? Men’s basketball seems a good place to start, with three of my world champion Boston Celtics on the team (but Jaylen Brown somehow not one of them). Whoops, I already missed the first game — a win over three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokic and Serbia — because it aired at 5 in the morning here, as does Saturday’s game against Puerto Rico. But maybe I can catch Wednesday’s rematch with feisty South Sudan.

Allow me to digress briefly to address the comparisons between the Dream Team and this year’s edition. People are making fools of themselves by bringing up the Dream Team’s 68-point win over Angola in contrast to the current edition’s one-point win over South Sudan, as well as the program’s handful of losses over the past four years (as opposed to the Dream Team’s undefeated — and unchallenged — romp through the 1992 Olympic field.

A couple of things to keep in mind: 1) The landscape has changed vastly in the past 32 years. The Dream Team wasn’t facing reigning NBA MVPs or teams where more than half the players had NBA experience (like the 2020 French team that took home Olympic gold with a win over a version of the U.S. team that pales in comparison to this one). 2) The Dream Team was star-studded, but Larry Bird was on the verge of retirement and Magic Johnson was a year out of the league. Both were shadows of their former selves. LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry are all 35-plus this year, but players age more gracefully now — partly thanks to the league allowing less physicality on defense than it did then and “load management,” but also because of advances in training and technology. Each of those players averaged more than 25 points per game this season and earned All-NBA honors (Durant second team and the others third team). Note that four out of five members of this year’s All-NBA first team are foreign players. That’s how much tougher the Olympic field is now. I think the current edition could give the original Dream Team a run for its money.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

I’ll probably check out the women’s basketball, too, once they reach the medal rounds.

Any sport with Hawaii athletes is worth checking out, so men’s volleyball should be worthwhile, as well as surfing, which has the added draw of seeing if I can spot my high school classmate Johann Bouit, who lives in Tahiti and is part of the staging of the competition.

That’s not much, so let’s take a look at what’s on TV today and try to think of what would Brian Boitano watch.

I generally enjoy tennis, but it just doesn’t feel special when these players already face each other all year long. My son played water polo in high school, so that might bring back some fond memories. We both did judo, so that could be cool. I grew up playing table tennis and even had a biology teacher at Pearl City High with a table in the open space where other science classrooms might have lab tables (since our lab tables were our everyday tables). At the Olympic level, the sport is nothing like what most of us played recreationally, which makes it relatable yet all the more impressive.

Looking further down the line, greats like Biles and swimmer Katie Ledecky will be high on my list, but potential breakouts like men’s gymnast Frederick Richard (from Bah-ston) and swimmer Katie Douglass are likely worth checking out. The U.S. has some great runners in Noah Lyles, Sha’Carri Richardson and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone who could put in performances that take me back to stars of my childhood such as Lewis, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Edwin Moses.

I may have to just put the TV on and click around to see what catches my eye. Part of the challenge in Hawaii, of course, is that there’s basically nothing on between noon and 8 p.m. each day. But, hey, I can always put on a baseball game during those hours, if I can find one that isn’t blacked out.