The Temporary Pass: Think of it as another competitive Olympic event.

NBC is streaming more of its Winter Games coverage than ever before -- 1,800 hours, which is great news if you can’t or don’t want to be glued to a TV during endless amounts of ice dancing and luge runs.

And if you have a cable TV subscription.

As detailed here, NBC Olympics's live streaming is available only to "authenticated" users. That means logging into NBCOlympics.com with your cable user name and password or getting the NBC Sports app via Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku and the like.

There is no TV free lunch, especially during the Olympics. But there is the Temporary Pass!

With the XXIII Olympic Winter Games officially beginning Friday in PyeongChang, South Korea, NBC says, users will be able to stream 30 minutes of coverage "prior to authentication on their first visit."

After that, they get five minutes of non-authenticated streaming per day (the Games run through Feb. 25).

So how will you expend your precious five minutes each day, cord cutters and never-havers? By watching a couple of speed demons in Saturday night’s men’s downhill skiing final, when all but the slowpokiest runs will last less than two minutes?

  Ryan Cochran-Siegle of the United States makes a run during the Men's Downhill Alpine Skiing training8 in Pyeongchang-gun, South Korea.  (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Credit: Ezra Shaw

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Credit: Ezra Shaw

How 'bout enjoying one -- but only one -- of the top competitors' four minute, 30 second-long routine when the women's figure skating gold medal is awarded the night of Feb. 22 (check out the daily schedule of events here, and remember that PyeongChang is 14 hours ahead of Atlanta and the rest of the Eastern Time Zone in the U.S.)?

Of course, the easiest thing to do would be just to break down and sign up for cable, if only temporarily.

But nobody ever said Olympic competition was supposed to be easy.

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