"We'll always have Paris."
Op-Ed pieces should stir some emotion - joy, anguish, uncertainty. The US basketball closure for a gold medal may be neither an end nor a beginning.
The Old Guard of LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Steph Curry delivered the 17th US basketball gold. Yet the operative word is old. Despite James's ability to remain 'forever young', it feels as though the torch must pass to the next iteration of US stars. Maybe that will be Tatum, Davis, Edwards, and others like Brunson, Booker, Brown, Flagg.
What seems obvious is the next generation of global stars like Jokic, Wembanyama, Doncic and their teammates are rapidly catching up. When talent and coaching difference narrow appreciably, then hard-to-measure factors like health, luck, and officiating can turn narrow victories into either narrower ones...or defeat.
Chest-thumping pride goeth before the fall or maybe before Los Angeles. The US had a fleet of proven coaches - Kerr, Spoelstra, Lue, and Few - so it's unreasonable to think coaching is the issue.
And there's young and mature US talent out there to be cultivated into a National Team, not just a month of preparation of All-Stars.
The rest of the world has closed the gap to the point that it requires otherworldly performances by aging legends to win. That's not to say that the US can't or won't muster competitive teams for decades.
But reality is saying that global competition has more than arrived in the arms race for basketball superiority. And yes, the US had more threes, more rebounds, and more assists than France. And maybe Tatum, Booker, Halliburton, Brunson, Flagg and whomever can reproduce the magic of Steph Curry's final two games. But possibility and certainty don't overlap. The margin for error has shrunk. Any hubris should disappear.
"We'll see."