Well, friends, we did it.
After three weeks of exploded sleep schedules and intravenous caffeine delivery, the Paris Olympic Games have drawn to a close.
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And what a Games it was.
As Team Australia charged to an all-time record of 18 golds from 53 medals, we watched as all sorts of weird and wonderful characters emerged across the past three weeks, from "pommel horse guy" to Raygun to Turkiye's not-so-secret assassin.
As the sun set on the city of love on Monday, 270 artists and performers gathered within the Stade de France to bid "adieu!" to the rest of the world, handing the baton over to Los Angeles, which will host the Olympics in four years' time.
Here's all the best and most bonkers bits from the Closing Ceremony.
1.French hero Leon Marchand extinguishes the flame
The French swimmer, who won five medals in Paris, is the first athlete we see at this Closing Ceremony.
He's at the Jardin des Tuileries, where the giant gold balloon cauldron has sat for the past two weeks.
He stares wistfully up at the balloon, but instead of walking across the platform to presumably unshackle it and fly off into the sunset, he heads towards a tiny plinth nearby holding the actual Olympic flame, which just looks like a tiny handheld lantern from a Charles Dickens novel.
Slowly, the light beneath the balloon fades, signalling the end of this glorious Games.
Marchand then walks back down the path and off into the distance while still holding the flame. A few hours later, he returns to our screens, emerging from beneath the Stade de France, carrying the little candle, wearing a very nice suit, looking awkward as hell.
He gets to the top of the stage and stands beside IOC president Thomas Bach before pulling a little ring to extinguish the flame.
Kinda anti-climactic after the golden balloon that soared into the sky to launch the start of the Games just 16 days ago.
But it's fine. It's not like I got up at a silly hour on a Monday morning to watch this.
2. Raygun is the life of the pre-ceremony party
Despite the waves of criticism she's copped since her performance at the women's breaking event a few days ago, Australian B-Girl Raygun has become an instant icon among Team Australia.
As the athletes lined up nearby, preparing to walk into the Stade de France for the Opening Ceremony, Raygun was spotted dropping some moves in a dance circle that had opened up around her.
Anna Meares, Australia's Chief de Mission, came to Raygun's defence recently, saying she's a beloved member of the Olympic team and represents so much of what the Games is about.
I am still personally waiting for an explanation as to whether her unusual routine was genuine breakdancing or a piece of bizarre performance art.
Perhaps we will never know.
3. Women's marathon gets the coolest medal ceremony
As the final event of the Paris Olympics, finishing late on Sunday, the women's marathon gets the best possible medal ceremony: right in the middle of the Stade de France.
It's the first time this event has closed the Games, and a fitting one for the first Olympics that had gender parity.
Dutchwoman Sifan Hassan won the event in an Olympic record time, having also won medals in the 5,000 and 10,000m events ... in the space of a week. My body hurts just writing that.
She was a refugee from Ethiopia who arrived in the Netherlands when she was a child, and leaps onto the podium wearing a hijab, which was a point of contention at this Olympics given French sport's strict rules around the wearing of head coverings.
She receives a huge roar from the crowd, while her Dutch teammates have all pushed up to the stage chanting her name.
Considering the right-wing swing of Europe these past few years, it's genuinely amazing to see an athlete like Hassan celebrated in a moment like this. Her story really does capture the spirit of the Olympics and the power of sport.
Now, back to the weird stuff...
4. Closing Ceremony fashion parade
Unlike the Opening Ceremony, where athletes were forced into stuffy formal ensembles, their outfits for the Closing Ceremony are far more casual.
There were a lot more bucket hats than last time, but far fewer traditional outfits. Portugal showed up wearing what looks like a kindergartener's matching multicoloured polo and cap. Liberia looked like a badass mixed hip-hop group in all-black cut-off sweats.
Team GB wore what appeared to be their grandmother's couch fabric as a shirt in a touching tribute to British culture. Botswana rocked some epic black, blue and white retro windbreakers, while the USA donned some Formula 1-style racing jackets, which would have been cool if they didn't have the snobby Ralph Lauren logo on the front.
Finally, as my colleague Dean Bilton on the ground in Paris described, Australia's team looked a little like staff from Taronga Zoo in forgettable linen shirts and truly horrifying cargo shorts, with some of them also wearing ... chef's hats? Perhaps as a tribute to that other famous French icon: Ratatouille?
Oh well. We've got Brisbane 2032 to look forward to. Hopefully Team Aus will discover style between now and then.
5. Who is the Golden Voyager?
The Paris Olympics has been book-ended by three mysterious figures. Sixteen days ago, it was the parkouring torch-carrier and glittering silver rider on the Seine, and on Monday it was a figure clad in gold.
The stadium falls dark with an ominous light show, with lightning-white bursts illuminating the broken continents below, while smoke billows out across the space. We're in some kind of distant reality, the world as we know it destroyed, while the figure, a voyager, slowly descends from the sky. It looks like how pins-and-needles feels.
Who are they? What do they want? Is it Tom Cruise? Is it Rebekah Vardy? Is it Raygun!?
They're joined by our favourite mysterious torch-bearer, who flips and cartwheels onto the stage carrying a giant golden rod that almost whacks the silver horserider in the face as they attach the Greek flag.
The pole is planted and the stadium bursts to life, a giant statue of the Winged Victory emerging from a nearby platform. Stadium-high shadows of athletes rotate around the stands like the Zodiac come to life.
Suddenly, several more alien-like figures emerge from the sky, while dozens more burst up from the floor. I am having PTSD flashbacks to the Battle of Moria from Lord of the Rings. The figures swarm like orcs around the stage before lifting five six-metre-high rings out of the ruins of the platforms, bringing them back to life.
The orcs then roll the rings towards each other, joining them back together in a very obvious metaphor for the unity that the Olympics is meant to represent.
A bunch of orcs do some cool gymnastics as the rings are lifted up into the sky in their traditional sequence as the golden voyager emerges over the top of them and reaches to the sky, fireworks exploding around the roof of the stadium.
We never learn who is beneath the golden costume. Maybe it was Ratatouille after all.
6. The athletes rebel
During the final montage of all the events and medals of Paris, hundreds of athletes who were gathered around the perimeter then leapt up onto the platforms that have been vacated by the Golden Voyager and their orc minions.
In the transition between the artistic and musical sections of the ceremony, there is a brief pause as the stadium announcer tells the athletes to "please remove themselves from the stage."
They don't. They ignore her. They want to soak in the moment. There's a band getting ready to play on one of the nearby platforms and they want a front-row seat.
She asks again: "please remove yourselves from the stage."
Nah. We've just done some of the most extreme feats of human athleticism, lady. Give us a break.
I respect it. Because what comes next is totally worth hanging around for.
7. Phoenix, Air, and Ezra Koenig deliver the bangers
We move from the moody, wistful performance art piece to just a straight-up concert, with famous French band Phoenix kicking off proceedings.
The first few iconic chords of "Lisztomania" begin to twang out into the night, and while they probably didn't expect to be performing literally a metre away from a bunch of athletes holding their iPhones in front of their faces, this Olympics has been full of all sorts of unexpected moments.
They're soon joined by Belgian singer Angele who, alongside DJ Kavinsky, perform a cool low-fi synthwave song before Phoenix is back on the mic, presumably filling space while the volunteers try and herd the athletes off the stage.
Shortly afterwards, Cambodian rapper VannDa emerges and lays down some bars, transitioning into an electric guitar solo by a person in a black hood (Tom Cruise?).
Phoenix then continue playing, this time accompanied by the famous musical duo Air, who are looking pretty unenthused about the whole thing, but maybe that's just because they're just French.
From one famous male singer to another, Ezra Koenig — lead singer of Vampire Weekend — is then out next to perform a duet of Tonight with Phoenix, which then bounces straight into Falling.
It's all ... a very different vibe to the Opening Ceremony, which was a three-hour operatic epic along the Seine River. This is basically just watching a cool set from the back of the Enmore Theatre.
I mean, I'm not really complaining, but did they blow their whole budget on the opening before they figured out what to do for the closing? Who's to say.
8. LA says: heeeeeeey!
After the traditional speeches, the Olympic baton is then officially handed over to Los Angeles, the hosts for 2028.
The American national anthem is performed by five-time Grammy winner H.E.R., who looks super glam in an all-white get-up, with an electric guitar strung across her front and incredible waves of golden hair rolling down her shoulders.
After an orchestral opening, the song then ends like a glam-rock anthem. It's incredibly ... American. I'm shocked the LA organisers haven't just released a bunch of eagles into the stadium.
But they kind of do: finally, after hours of waiting, Tom Cruise is spotted at the lip of the roof, and abseils down on a wire to the floor.
It is not quite as cool as when he did it in Mission Impossible, mostly because he is a lot older now, looks a bit frightened, and kinda trips as he lands.
He's mobbed by athletes as soon as he gets there, though, and takes heaps of selfies on his walk to the stage to collect the Olympic flag, before leaping down onto a motorbike and taking off into the tunnel beneath the stadium.
A video montage then starts, with Cruise diving out of a plane and propelling towards the earth before landing and sprinting off into the hills of LA.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers soundtrack the montage featuring iconic athletes Kate Courtney (mountain biking), Michael Johnson (track), and Jagger Eaton (skateboarding) who ride, run, and skate the Olympic flag through LA's iconic backdrops.
The editors have clearly cleaned up the orange haze of the city's omnipresent pollution and removed their infinite freeways in post-production to make it a bit more appealing for international visitors.
Eaton arrives on Venice Beach, and the Chillis are actually there, on a stage, introducing the Games to LA's most iconic strip.
Flea is gyrating in yellow shorts and a hat. I would risk getting emphysema from the city's terrible smog to watch this.
Billie Eillish follows afterwards, standing atop a lifeguard tower singing her new song "Birds of a Feather", but she's easily eclipsed by the real star of the Olympics: Snoop Dogg.
He arrives onto Venice Beach on a golden low-rider, accompanied by a scantily-clad dancer.
He immediately swaggers into Drop It Like It's Hot before joining rapper Dr. Dre on the stage for a PC version of Smoke Weed Everyday, which I'm pleasantly surprised they were allowed to perform, and which I dearly hope is incorporated into their own Opening Ceremony four years from now.
9. They did it their way
The final performance of the Closing Ceremony is possibly the best of the bunch, though French singer Yseult always had a lot to do to eclipse the Opening Ceremony's glorious anthem by Celine Dion.
She goes close, though. She's dressed in a smart all-black outfit and delivers a slow, sultry performance of Frank Sinatra's hit My Way, which, I learned just now, was actually an English translation of an original French song, and therefore a fitting choice to tie the Olympics of 2024 and 2028 together.
The crowd inside the Stade de France, who have all been wearing light-up wristbands throughout the night, now whip out their phones and wave their lights back and forth as she belts out a ripper version of the song, ending with an epic final note that's accompanied by fireworks exploding around the rim of the stadium.
With that, the Paris Olympics has drawn to a close. And they certainly did it their way.
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