'Dancing with the Stars,' season 18, and the winner is ...

Every season I predict the winner of "Dancing with the Stars" on the morning of the finals -- that's right, I've got a life and I'm living it large -- but almost invariably manage to get it wrong. I'm proud of that record, a testament to the fact that I really don't have a clue what I'm talking about when I talk "DWTS," but also to the cleverness of producer Conrad Green and protean "DWTS" who and which still manage to find ways to pull off little surprises after all these seasons.

Of course there's no surprise to the three we find in the finalists' circle, with possibly the exception of Candace Cameron Bure. Of course this was all going to come down to Meryl Davis and Maksim Chmerkovskiy and Derek Hough and Amy Purdy. That was the plan all along and it succeeded well.

It's easy to dismiss this final as all glitter-ball showmanship -- an ending crafted long before it ever even got to this point. But I actually do think this is a special end, and that the winner will indeed be someone who defied the odds -- to use that old tired line -- and did it in a way that created a sense of wonder in those who witnessed and a sense of real joy, too. Maybe you can really do what you set out to do, even when that would seem, on the face of it, impossible. Maybe those odds can be defied, and the fates overruled, and .?.?. darn it, maybe that glitter ball trophy really does mean something after all.

Of course the winner has to be Amy Purdy. The winner must be Amy Purdy. The winner will be Amy Purdy.

This wasn't easy for her and it could not have been easy -- even with the always superlative multiple champion Hough by her side most of the season. (And if somehow you are not aware, she lost both lower legs to bacterial meningitis as a young girl, and dances on prosthetic legs.) But she did it all with unfailing grace and a seeming belief in the goal -- that winning is in fact not quite everything but the process in getting there certainly is.

Good for her and for Hough -- they have briefly restored my faith in a show that gets wheezier and geezier by the season. But every so often it does find a real champion worth crowning. This one, for example. Here's the freestyle again from last night.