Gold medal game is a last dance worth soaking in for Team USA’s brightest stars

LeBron James is 39 and has all but acknowledged that this will be his final Olympics. Kevin Durant is 35, Steph Curry 36. Together, they’re arguably the three defining players of an entire generation of American basketball. It feels like a small miracle that we got to see them compete on the same team at the highest level at all. And on Saturday, we’ll get to do so one last time, on the grandest possible stage.

The conversation around USA basketball is almost always focused on the next outcome, the next roster. That’s simply how it goes with a team for whom winning is the expectation and losing an existential tragedy; no matter how many trophies get fed to the beast, it’s never really enough. And that’s all well and good: You can’t produce something transcendent without meaning a great deal to a great many people, and as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. But it also risks sucking up all the oxygen in the room, and we shouldn’t allow that to happen no matter how things shake out on Saturday. 

James, Curry and Durant are singular talents, all still capable of recapturing their peaks for stretches at a time, and it’s evident to anyone watching them play what it means to be an Olympian; one of the underrated thrills of the comeback against Serbia seeing the trio collectively raise itself to another level, desperate to scratch and claw and do whatever else was needed to escape with a win. They’re the sorts of athletes we want the generations that come after us to understand, and the odds are good that when we do, this game will be at the tip of our tongues. We should all try and make sure to remember how it feels.