Boston 2024 is gone from the minds of the public, having melted away swiftly following the decision by the United States Olympic Committee to pull the bid in late July. In the time since, Boston 2024 employees have slowly begun to move on, as the once thriving day-to-day of an Olympic push has subsided. The sunglasses and gear have been given away, while the office supplies will be donated. What remains to be disclosed is what happens to the money Boston 2024 raised.

In its first (and only) quarterly report, Boston 2024 noted that it had raised approximately $14 million since its January 2014 start. Clearly, more was raised in the second quarter of 2015, even as the bid encountered increasing trouble.

Exactly what happens to that money has not been revealed. Of course, it’s not even known if the bid will necessarily finish with a surplus. The uncertainty in this instance is created by the fact that there are still outstanding bills and obligations (with other loose ends left to tie up). Also, the bid’s infrastructure has already been essentially washed away. Email addresses previously linked to the bid now send automatic replies with a message that includes:

“As of Friday, August 7, 2015 this email address is no longer associated with Boston 2024.”

Naturally, there is a portion of the public who will rightfully ask why any of this even matters. After all, the bid (which was privately funded) is now dead.

Still, the Olympic bidding process goes on. Los Angeles is greedily eyeing the Olympic torch that Boston is passing to another U.S. city, as the two-time Summer Games host courts a USOC endorsement for its own 2024 bid.

With that in mind, understanding how Boston 2024 was managed in a conclusive way will help illuminate many modern issues with bidding for the Games. For all of the promises of the IOC’s Agenda 2020, little appears to have changed beyond official rhetoric.

Any doubters need only look at the recent IOC election for the 2022 Winter Olympics, where Beijing was given the chance to become the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games. This despite Beijing’s utter lack of natural snow or even the presence of a decent mountain with 50 miles of the massive Chinese city.

“We vote with our hearts, not our heads,” Norwegian IOC member Gerhard Heiberg plainly admitted prior to the selection. That would seem to give credence to the underlying belief that IOC policy changes haven’t altered its electorate. And despite the difficult choice of the bid (Almaty, Kazakstan was far from an ideal alternative), it nonetheless poses more questions regarding Olympic bidding than it answered.

Boston could, in theory, help to answer some of the questions by showing that, even in defeat, the bid was open about how it was managed in retrospect. Up to this point, despite numerous occasions where Boston 2024’s transparency was called into question, it was nonetheless the most transparent Olympic bid in recent history. Whether or not that says more about the openness of Boston’s bid or just the consistent murkiness of the IOC process is up for debate. That said, Boston could continue to at least try for a new standard in this instance, even if it did so imperfectly.

Looking back at recent history, Chicago, the last U.S. city to bid for a Summer Games, ended with a surplus only after it spent an enormous sum. All told, Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Games spent $70.6 million, which looked like a hollow investment considering that it was eliminated by the IOC in the very first round of voting in October 2009. The total sum was only discovered months later when the bid filed its final income tax return.

Other reports placed New York’s failed bid for the 2012 Olympics at around $25 million in spending, though the information is far from concrete.

Of course, what separates Boston from both Chicago and New York is that Boston 2024 was the shortest lived USOC-endorsed bid in history. It didn’t even make it to the formal bid declaration deadline, let alone an IOC vote. Therefore, Boston’s money totals are far less than the other, longer-running bids.

Yet even in its aftermath, Boston 2024 continues to have both lingering questions and lingering opportunity. It could help to provide an example for future bids, though much will depend on what the final record shows.