It's tough to talk about the U.S. men's basketball team without becoming a prisoner of the moment. This is partly because those moments are rare; Team USA only assembles its A-team a handful of times every two to four years. It's also because the stakes of each one feel so very high — not just the outcome of a game but the standing of a basketball nation, the chance to reaffirm us as a purveyor of elite athletes and retain some sense of control over a game that once was ours but now belongs to the whole world. 

And the moment could hardly be bigger than it will be on Saturday afternoon, when the U.S. meets Victor Wembanyama and France in the gold medal game. The Americans have navigated the deepest field in Olympic history over the past two weeks, surviving a semifinal scare from arguably the best player on planet Earth only to now come face-to-face with a 20-year-old alien who might wear that crown himself in just a couple years’ time. To climb that mountain, to fend off all comers yet again and win a historic fifth straight gold medal in front of a hostile crowd with the world watching: It doesn’t seem hyperbolic to say that this is among the biggest inflections points in American sport in recent memory.

Amid all of that, it can feel gauche to talk about the individual. Still, USA basketball has always stood above and beyond the sum of its parts – the names on the jerseys change over the years, but the standard never does. But, well, not all parts are created equal. And while Saturday’s showdown feels all-consuming, it also represents a last dance of sorts: the final chance to watch some of the greatest players who have ever played for the stars and stripes.

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.