Events and delegates in C#

It has been a source of great frustration that I could not figure out why the event keyword was necessary. To me it looked like you could just drop it, and in fact this is true. The "only" (I am told there are also some finer differences) difference between a delegate and an event is that "events are like delegates that can only have the += and -= operators applied to them." (from an article by Eric Gunnarson). So simple, yet I have not seen this stated anywhere ... and I have looked in many places!
Grrrr