BEIJING | I came for a no-hitter. I wandered through security, got my daily pat-down, waited patiently under the partly smoggy skies, walked on a bus, got accosted by two volunteers desperate for Olympic pins, wandered across a long parking lot, almost got hit by two or three buses, got accosted again for pins, transferred to a second bus, bounced through downtown Beijing, almost got sideswiped twice. And I didn&#8217;t mind at all.</p><p>Nope. I came to a United States softball game. I was going to see a no-hitter.</p><p>I made it to Fengtai Softball Field with a few minutes to spare, wandered through the American media crush (four reporters, maybe five), found a perfect seat right behind home plate. Yes. Here it was. My no-hitter. U.S. pitcher Cat Osterman began warming up; she&#8217;s very tall and left-handed and, of course, she had already thrown a no-hitter at these Olympics.</p><p>Well, heck, everyone on the U.S. softball team has thrown at least one no-hitter. This was Monday, and the United States had played six previous games at the Olympics. Three of them were no-hitters. Three. One of those was a perfect game. In other words, if you buy a ticket to see the U.S. softball team face off at the Olympics against the best teams the world has to offer, you have a 50-50 shot at seeing a no-hitter.</p><p>All in all, the world was hitting .039 against the United States of America.</p><p>Osterman finished the last of her warm-up pitches and was ready to begin. She threw her Olympic no-hitter against Australia last week, and that was an unusual game because it was one of only two U.S. games at the Olympics that lasted the regulation seven innings. The four others ended after only five innings because of the mercy rule.</p><p>All in all, the United States had outscored its opponents 44-1. The one run, given up to Canada, was unearned.</p><p>I pulled out my scorecard and very neatly wrote in the names of the Chinese lineup that was about to get no-hit. Chou Yi. You Yanhong. Li Chunxia. A colleague noticed that Sun Li was followed by Tan Ying, meaning that Sun Tan batted back-to-back. I didn&#8217;t have time for name jokes. This was for posterity. I&#8217;ve managed to keep all the scorecards of no-hitters I&#8217;ve seen in my life &#8212; well, both of them. I saw Daisuke Yamai and Hitoki Iwase combine on a perfect game in the clinching game of last year&#8217;s Japan Series. And I saw Jon Lester throw a no-hitter against the Kansas City Royals in May.</p><p>Now, here would be my third no-no &#8212; and in a third country. And this no-hitter would be something special because the U.S. softball team isn&#8217;t just playing for a gold medal. It is playing for survival.</p><p>You have no doubt heard that the International Olympic Committee has decided to drop softball after these Olympics. There seem to be two reasons. One &#8212; and this is probably the biggest reason &#8212; the IOC was tired of fighting with Major League Baseball over doping rules and a refusal to let the best players in the world play at the Olympics. So it threw out the sport. Softball, it seems, was just collateral damage.</p><p>The second reason is a little bit blurrier, but the thinking seems to be that the United States is just too good. The U.S. has won all three Olympic gold medals, it outscored everyone 51-1 in Athens, it&#8217;s so good that the Chinese announcer before the game announced to the fans, &#8220;The United States is very dominant in softball.&#8221;</p><p>Everyone at the IOC has denied that America&#8217;s dominance has anything to do with the great softball purge &#8212; after all, they say, dominance is not the point, China is dominant in table tennis, Austria in alpine skiing, Germany in luge, the Hungarians in water polo and so on. But there is something fishy here: IOC president Jacques Rogge said that softball does not have &#8220;universal appeal,&#8221; even though it is played in more than 100 countries, probably quite a few more than modern pentathlon. He seemed to be saying, &#8220;We&#8217;re tired of watching the rest of the world get pummeled by these Americans.&#8221;