By John Feinstein
Special to washingtonpost.com
Sunday, August 24, 2008 9:30 PM

Now, almost three years later, Mike Krzyzewski can take a deep breath. The Olympic gold medal in men's basketball belongs to the United States once again and Krzyzewski will not have to spend the rest of his life explaining what went wrong.

Because nothing did.

Oh sure, Spain made a valiant fourth-quarter run in the gold-medal game to cut the gap to 91-89 with a little more than eight minutes to play, but this group of Americans wasn't going to lose. Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade hit big shots, the defense held up and the U.S. won, 118-107. To some the relatively close score matters. To those who know basketball, all that matters is the victory.

To understand the pressure on Krzyzewski and this team, one must go back four years to Athens, to a Larry Brown-coached U.S. team that bickered its way to a 5-3 record in the Olympics and was lucky to escape with a bronze medal. That humiliation forced everyone involved in basketball in this country to take a step back and try to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.

Jerry Colangelo took over and organized a three-year program to reclaim the gold medal. Krzyzewski was hired to coach the team beginning with the World Championships in 2006, with the goal being to peak in Beijing in 2008. Players were asked to commit for at least two and even three summers. There would be no more throwing together a team in six weeks and figuring that would be good enough. Athens proved it wasn't nearly good enough.

There was one loss: to Greece in the semifinals of the World Championships on a night when the Greeks made everything and the pick-and-roll was clearly Greek to the U.S. defense. Because of that loss, the U.S. had to play in the Tournament of the Americas last summer to qualify for the Olympics. That turned out to be a good thing, because it gave Krzyzewski and his coaches more time to understand international play and the players more time to play with one another.

Every win at the Olympics was by double digits. The players were willing to work on defense every night, they were committed to the notion that winning was all that mattered, and the one time they were challenged -- in the final -- they dug in and did what they had to do to win.

Supremacy was re-established -- at least for the moment. Understand this, though: if Spain had stayed hot down the stretch and somehow pulled the upset, the gnashing of teeth would have begun again and Krzyzewski would have been blamed for not understanding the psyche of pro players.

That's the way of sports. If Michael Phelps hadn't gotten his fingernail on the wall just before Milorad Cavic in the 100-meter butterfly, the word "failure" would have appeared next to the name of someone who won seven Olympic gold medals. Rarely does anyone "win" a silver medal. You lose the gold. Krzyzewski knew that when he took the job. He took the gamble that his entire coaching legacy could have been damaged by an Olympic loss and the gamble has now paid off.

When we remember these Olympics, we will think about the so-called, "Redeem Team," but there is no question that the two dominant figures of these Games were Phelps and Usain Bolt, whose track performances were as stunning as Phelps's performances were in the pool. (Memo to Jacques Rogge, who criticized Bolt's postrace celebrations: Shut up).

The most stunning photo of the games was not the one of Bolt pulling up to celebrate in the 100 meters and still breaking the world record, but his finish in the 200, when he actually ran through the tape. There's not another soul in the photo of him at the finish line, because the other runners were so far behind.

Phelps and Bolt will both ¿ justifiably -- become quite wealthy because of their performances in Beijing. Both will no doubt be in London in four years and the expectations each will have to deal with will be extraordinary. That's another thing about sports: no one wants to talk about what you did last time; they want to know what you're going to do next time.

What makes the Olympics special, though, often has little to do with the biggest stars or the biggest names. There's almost always a story about someone or some team that will never get anywhere near a cereal box, a television commercial or a seven-figure book deal. Over the weekend, several media outlets ran stories about Iceland's performance in the team handball event.

The men's team had clinched the fourth medal in the history of the country -- for those of you counting at home, that's 12 medals fewer than Phelps has won -- by winning a semifinal against Spain. The entire country had come to a stop during the semifinal and would do the same for the championship match. Even after losing to France in the gold-medal match, the players on the team knew they would go home as national heroes. In this case, they did, in fact, "win" a silver medal.

That's the kind of story that makes the Olympics worthwhile.

The ship sailed long ago on the notion that these are athletes competing purely for the love of competition. The last truly great amateur story in the Olympics was the U.S. men's hockey team at Lake Placid in 1980.

That's not meant to demean Phelps or Bolt or any of the other athletes who understand that Olympic success will fill their bank accounts in the very near future. That's the way of the world right now. The good news is that the money allows athletes like Phelps and Bolt and many others to continue in their sports rather than having to retire or take money under the table. The team handball players from Iceland will probably do quite nicely financially when they get home because of their performance. More power to them.

What's bothersome is the self-righteousness of people like Rogge and the International Olympic Committee. They still try to sell the notion that the Olympics are somehow more pure or better than other sporting events. They certainly aren't any more pure. They're fun, they're thrilling at times, moving at others. But there are plenty of other events in sports that are fun and thrilling and moving.

They just aren't quite as political.

So let us leave these Olympics with a smile on our faces. The Chinese government managed not to torture anyone while the Games were going on; the air-quality held and the venues were superb.

Most important, we witnessed some truly wonderful performances and had some moments worth remembering forever. Years ago, someone said that, in the end, only the athletes save the Olympics.

Never was that more true than the past two weeks. From Iceland to the United States to China and Chinese Taipei, we should thank them all.