Why softball deserves to be in the Games By Steve Simmons, SUN MEDIA

BEIJING - No one had to argue the case. All they had to do was play.

If there was any kind of debate as to whether softball belonged at the Olympic Games, that debate ended here. If anyone from the International Olympic Committee has any conscience or appreciation for what went on here, they will immediately return softball back to the Olympic calendar.

The playoffs were that compelling and that dramatic.

The U.S. wasn’t supposed to lose. It did. Japan wasn’t supposed to win. It did.

But the way the Final Four in softball worked out spoke well for the sport and for its continuing campaign to fight its way back to the Games.

The bronze medal game between Canada and Australia was pure excitement. The lead changed hands several times. In a sport that it supposed to be all pitching and nothing else, a pile of runs were scored. And those were the third and fourth place teams playing.

The first-place, second-place game after the preliminary round, between Japan and the U.S., went to extra innings before the U.S. earned the bye to the final.

The semi-final game between Japan and Australia went to extra innings before Japan won it.

And then came he unlikely final - with Japan shocking the U.S. for gold.

Women’s hockey, for example, in no trouble with the IOC, should pray one day its games are this exciting and its field is this deep. The softball playoffs featured teams from three different continents and a competitive team from Venezuela meaning a fifth continent is involved and active.

Of course, there are no European teams of any quality, hence the trouble with the pro-European IOC.

There are a whole lot of questionable sports at the Olympic Games - softball, played this way, with this kind of depth, this kind of quality, should not be so easily dismissed. All you had to do is watch to see that.