It will take something of at least that magnitude to trump the staggering pyrotechnic display -- Cecil B. Demille meets "Fantasia" meets Survival Research Labs meets half the teenage population of Australia -- that opened the Games of the XXVII Olympiad before 110,000 roaring spectators in the vast, spanking-new Olympic Stadium Friday.

Over the course of the last few Olympics, the opening ceremonies have become exercises in blow-your-mind one-upmanship. I'll see your flaming arrow lighting the Olympic Flame and raise you a seven-ton flaming cauldron that will be lifted out of a miraculously appearing waterfall and carried hundreds of feet through rushing, multicolored streams of water. You gonna pull some heart-tugging old five-gold-medalist swimmer out of retirement to carry the torch? We got Muhammad Ali, chump. But with this stunning four-hour extravaganza, Sydney has now put the thousands-of-tapdancers bar up so high that maybe the production-values brinkmanship will finally stop. And that might not be a bad thing.

Olympic opening ceremonies are always wonderful -- you can't screw them up no matter how hard you try. The Games are simply too big, too essentially dignified, to be emotionally kidnapped by some ad man with a big budget. But they're prone to the kind of scientifically researched emotional manipulation found in telephone ads -- those exquisitely crafted little corporate narratives that get you blubbering in 22 seconds, or even less if you have a hangover. Combine plodding and/or smarmy story lines or concepts with the usual clichés -- cute li'l tykes singing their hearts out, inspirational pop ballads sung by hyperbolically emoting big-haired singers -- and add, God help us, marching bands, and the treacle factor can be extreme. We're not talking Super Bowl halftime levels of horror, but you hate to see the august Olympics coming even anywhere near that depraved universe.

Sydney's performance didn't. It was by far the most technically advanced and artistically sophisticated opening ceremony ever at an Olympics. The show conceived by director of ceremonies Ric Birch and artistic director David Atkins was so audacious, so brilliantly executed, that even its sentimentality seemed forgivable. From the moment that the little "Hero Girl," played by Nikki Webster, soared into the air as beautifully designed enormous fish floated about in a beautifully realized dream sequence, you realized that people with both a genuinely theatrical and a visual sensibility had been involved in the project.

Politics 2000: Unflinching daily political news, analysis and commentary.