In the Crowd: Phelps and family after the race. Photo by Donald Miralle for NEWSWEEK

Sunday 8/17--A confession: early in week of the swimming competition, I and a lot of other American journalists would not have been too disappointed had Michael Phelps lost a race, say that 4X200 meters relay in which Jason Lezak bailed him out with a phenomenal final leg.

Nothing personal. He's a great swimmer, a total professional and a genial young man. But he's also a pool rat, with no real interests outside the water. A daily diet of Phelps and more Phelps left us struggling for new things to say and new verbs and adjectives with which to say it. Fast, faster, fastest!

With Phelps consuming all our attention, we were unable to pay much or any attention to some standout American swimmers--Aaron Piersol, Rebecca Soni, Ryan Lochte, Natalie Coughlin--whose gold-medal performances lit up The Swim Cube and whose stories, if not necessarily any more compelling than his, were at least different. When I wrote about Lochte or Ian Crocker, it was as potential foils for Phelps. When I wrote about Lezak, it was as best supporting actor. Even "Supermom" Dara Torres who arrived in Beijing on a torrent of publicity got relatively short shrift for her--extraordinary at age 41 or at any age--three silver medals.

The Phelps saga also confined a lot of reporters to The Cube, which, though my favorite of the new stadiums, began to feel rather claustrophobic. Life at pool level kept us from venturing too far--to the beach volleyball where Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh continued a winning streak that now approaches a year, to the basketball venue where Kobe and company were demonstrating that NBA players can play defense or to the volleyball courts where the U.S. men's team was playing its heart out for a coach whose family had endured an unimaginable tragedy here.

But all sports reporters, however cynical they may at times appear, began life as sports fans. And as Phelps continued to defy the odds and amaze with his combination of prowess and good fortune, we were seduced by the magnitude of his achievements and the lure of history. Once he won the two events in which he settled for bronze four years ago in Athens and passed the halfway mark, we were all pretty much on board--silently cheering him all the way and sharing his dream.

Of course, he had never shared with us what exactly his dream was. While it was implicitly defined by the events he entered, Phelps never said a word publicly about hoping to win eight gold medals and to break Mark Spitz's record of seven in one Olympics. After he claimed the eighth gold medal today in the 4X100 relay, he finally revealed it or, more precisely, just conceded the obvious: "What else could I do?" he said. "Doing all best times, winning every race--everything was accomplished that I wanted to." (Okay, he left one world record on the deck, but who's going to quibble?)

The final 4X100 medley relay, with the Americans talented at every stroke, had been regarded as one of Phelps' easiest golds. But the Australians made it anything but. When Phelps hit the water for the butterfly, the third leg of the race, he found himself swimming in third place, behind the Aussies. One hundred meters later, after Phelps' last great swim of this Olympics--almost a full second better than his Australian counterpart, the U.S. team had a comfortable lead and Lezak would have just as soon drowned as relinquish it. "This was not just for Michael, but for all of us," he said following the race..

And I guess by then I had begun to believe "for all of us" existed in a far larger sense. In some ways, what Phelps accomplished is simply unfathomable. Spitz was a great champion, but in 1972 when he won his seven golds in Munich the swimming world was a much smaller place. There were no gold medalists from Brazil or Tunisia back then. You had to beat one top American teammate, but you didn't have another hotshot Californian chasing you in Serbian colors.

I have covered 10 Olympics now for Newsweek, seen Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, the original Dream Team, "The Magnificent Seven", Mia Hamm and her soccer sisters, Tomba "La Bomba", Gordyeva and Grinkov, Torvill and Dean and just this week the balletic gymnastics of Nastia Liukin and the historic speed of Usain Bolt. All these Olympic moments and achievements sent chills up my spine. This performance by Phelps, one that combined excellence and endurance, certainly rivals any of them, perhaps even surpasses all of them. (The superb Australian breast-stroker Liesel Jones, who won a gold medal today in the relay just before Phelps' finale, said her greatest thrill in Beijing was watching Phelps swim. Clearly a lot of other swimmers felt that way too.)

I have no need to rank these greatest Olympic hits. Each has a prominent place in the scrapbook of my mind. Same with Phelps who said every memory of this perfect week of swimming--"a fun week," he called it--is ingrained in his mind and heart. On the other hand, he is taking home a lot of souvenirs: every swimsuit, every pair of goggles, all the sweats he donned this week at the pool. And before he starts getting all secretive again about his next dream, he did admit that he has his sights set on London 2016. Maybe swimming a few different races. Is it possible that he could try for a repeat while swimming five different individual events? Phelps would say that he is living proof that you can dream big--the impossible dream--and actually achieve it. "I'm lucky to have everything I have--the talent, the drive and the excitement about the sport," he said.