Now just imagine being able to tell your friends that not only were you in the arena, but you were on the same ice as the Canucks while they were receiving their gold medals, the Maple Leaf rose to the roof, O Canada played, and hearts across the country swelled with pride.

AmyK. Berry doesn’tneedto imagine it –she was there.

“You felt like you had won gold,” says Berry.

“You’re standing right there and all the hockey players are around you. It was incredible. You had to kind of pinch yourself and go ‘Oh yeah, I’m working.’”

Eight years ago, at the Games in Utah, Berry was a camera assistant for the Olympic broadcasting crew that beamed television coverage of the event across the world.

When Canada won gold in both men’s and women’s hockey, she had to run out onto the ice and shoot the footage.

“I stayed professional, but it was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t believe I’m standing right here at this moment,’” Berry says.

This month, Berry gets to do it all again –hopefully with a happy ending again for Canada, of course –at the Vancouver Olympics.

She’s headed west next week as a microphone technician for Olympic Broadcasting Services Vancouver, which will produce and transmit the live radio and TV coverage feeds of the 2010 Winter Olympics Games.

With her headphones on, Berry will be rinkside at the Canada Hockey Place, making sure viewers at home get the right levels of crowd noise, of player screams, of slap shots, and so on.

While it might sound simple to the outsider, the work can be pretty complex, says Berry, who lives in Guelph and works as an audio technician in Burlington.

“There is a lot to it,” she says. “The joke is that no one knows there is a sound person –unless you can’t hear somebody.”

As we chat, she rhymes off words like “math,” “ambience,” and “reflection of sound” while describing her work.

Born in Newmarket, Berry came to Guelph when she just a wee one. At 14, she would move to Florida before returning here at 21.

The Olympic dream got rolling for her while she was studying media communications at Asbury College in Kentucky –the program helped her get the gig at the 2002 Winter Games.

She would go on to the Toronto Film School to study recording arts, as she wanted to concentrate on the audio aspect of things.

“Then when I heard about Vancouver, I applied and they hired me without even interviewing me, so that was pretty cool,” says Berry.

There is lots to be learned by working an event as huge as the Olympics, and Berry hopes it can help her reach the next platform –she would like to eventually do post-production audio for film.

“When I go there I want to learn as much as I can, so I can build on that,” says the 29-year-old.

In Vancouver, she’ll be working exclusively at hockey games at Canada Hockey Place, which is the main facility for hockey at the Games. It will house both the men’s and women’s gold medal games.

For Berry, a hockey fan, it truly is a dream gig.

And that she’s getting paid for it is the cherry on the cake.

“I would definitely do it for free as well,” she says.

“The experience and everything you learn is payment enough.”