His name was Herlander Coimbra.

He was one of the better players on the Angolan national basketball team in 1992. As fate would have it, Angola drew the short straw in the Olympic Games and was the first-round opponent of the U.S. men's basketball team. Known to most of the rest of the world as the "Dream Team."

Mr. Coimbra's 15 minutes came during the first half. The game, improbably, was tied at 7 when the U.S. team went on a little bit of a run. OK, it was a 46-1 run, and the only reason I believe it occurred is that I was there to see it. For almost 13 minutes, the Americans put on a display of fast breaking and shooting where the ball did not touch the floor. Rebound to outlet to lead pass to trailer to dunk, over and over. It was dizzying, it was spectacular, it was five guys playing against the game of basketball, not their opponent.

	Charles Barkley was the life of the party in Barcelona at the 1992 Olympics.

It was during this run -- the U.S. team had ripped off 31 straight points and led 38-7 -- that Coimbra made the mistake of hitting Charles Barkley under the basket. Now, those of you that have gotten to know Barkley over the years realize that what happened next should have been no surprise to anyone. After all, asked days before to handicap the mismatch, Barkley had said, "I don't know anything about Angola, but I know they're in trouble."

So it was no surprise to those of us who covered the NBA that Barkley turned around and clocked Coimbra in the chest with an elbow. (Afterward, Coimbra, who thought Barkley was the best player in the world, said charitably, "If somebody makes violence with me, it's preferable that I get out before the violence.") If Coimbra's ribs didn't collapse entirely around Barkley, he was, to put it charitably, thinner than Charles, and he staggered around the court for a few moments. And the crowd at the Palau d'Esports de Badalona started jeering, turning on the Americans in a flash.

Of course, later that night, when Barkley went out for his nocturnal walk along the "Ramblas," the sprawling avenue that was part gathering place, part watering hole, part performance art in downtown Barcelona, those same fans surrounded the Chuckster, and he happily met them all. Not to mention the hundreds of dollars he gave to a homeless woman.

Such was life with the Dream Team.

Some have claimed that "Dream Team" moniker for subsequent U.S. Olympic teams, as if it merely refers to any collection of NBA talent. Those people are fools. There was, and there will only be, one Dream Team. It was not only a confluence of the best players in league history at a time when they were desperately needed by the States, but also the moment when basketball truly became global. Before 1992, there were the occasional Big Moments in international basketball, like the Soviet Union's disputed victory in the '72 Games over a depleted U.S. squad. But those moments had no legs outside of their countries.

The Dreamers sold lots of NBA merchandise around the world, to be sure. But it was their play and their persona that had the lasting impact around the globe. You had to be there to see what their presence did to each and every team they faced, from their Beatles-like triumph at the Tournament of the Americas in Portland a month before the Games to their domination in Badalona, where they won by an average margin of 43.8 points per rout. You had to see the world's other players literally pulling cameras out of their shorts when the games ended, so they could get pictures with Jordan and Bird. You had to hear the crowd yelling "Majeek! Majeek!" to Earvin Johnson, who had told the world nine months earlier that he had "acquired" the HIV virus.

That the team came together at all was something of an upset. The need for pros came about after U.S. teams comprising the usual college juniors and seniors had been beaten fair and square in the Pan American Games, the '88 Olympics and the Goodwill Games. The feeling that the college kids could no longer keep up with the world's pros started a groundswell for including NBA players the next time around. Nowadays, people complain about how boring it is for the Americans to win by double digits, or win in less than impressive fashion, or some breach of the precious Olympic Ideal protocol. (Like Amy Van Dyken spitting in the lane of her opponents, I guess.)

But in the early '90s, there was none of that, only the desperate desire to get back on top of a sport that we had dominated. So USA Basketball went for the downs. It was a long, arduous process. First, Bird -- whose back problems had reduced him to a shell of his brilliance -- didn't want to be a cheerleader. If Bird didn't play, Johnson wouldn't play. It took Herculean lobbying to get Bird, who would indeed spend most of the Games lying on his stomach, to change his mind. Then, Jordan said he didn't want to play. Whether it was because he wanted to rest after a championship season, or because he'd already won gold in 1984 in Los Angeles, or because he wanted to stick it one more time to Isiah Thomas by forcing the committee to keep Thomas off the team, we may never really know. But the bottom line was that Jordan was selected, and Thomas wasn't, and that was the one omission that still sticks in my craw to this day. Isiah should have been on that team, period.

Once the Big Three were in line, it was easy to get the rest: Robinson and Ewing, Stockton-to-Malone, Pippen and Mullin, Barkley, Drexler and Duke senior Christian Laettner. Some of them had been on the '84 team, but others had never really spent much time together. Like Bird and Ewing. At first glance -- and second, and third -- they appeared to have nothing in common. But the Olympic experience brought parts of each man's personality out that had been hidden during years of battles in the Atlantic Division.

	They hung out. They found that they liked each other. By the end of the Games, Bird was calling Ewing 'Harry' and everyone referred to the two of them as 'Harry and Larry.'

They hung out. They found that they liked each other. By the end of the Games, Bird was calling Ewing "Harry" and everyone referred to the two of them as "Harry and Larry." Drexler played tennis with the Commish. Jordan and Johnson spent God knows how much money in a Monte Carlo casino before the Games; the team's Ambassador Hotel downtown became a fortress, with two separate checkpoints for visitors.

Some folks in the Olympic Movement got their knickers in a twist over the special treatment given the Dreamers. They expected the NBA players to stay in the dorms with the other U.S. Olympians, hang out with the Finns, eat native foods with the Ecuadorans. "This is not what the Olympics are all about," said Fidel Castro, decrying the professionalism that had crept into the Games, leaving unasked the question of how impoverished Teofilo Stevenson and the cadre of Cuban boxers that dominated the Olympics for 20 years were as they somehow suffered through their "amateur" status.

Except for one small detail, Fidel and the others would have had a real issue. The small detail being that everyone in the world wanted a piece of the Dreamers, wanted an autograph, a picture, an interview. If they had stayed in the dorms, they may have never gotten to the arena in time. (And that would have been an interesting story to cover.) It was left to Stockton, who hasn't had five words to say since, to summarize the pro ballers' feelings.

"We have a saying in Utah," Stockton said. "The Indians didn't dine with Custer."

So the Dream Team rolled through the Games, and Chuck Daly never did have to call a single timeout, and the United States got its gold medal and its dominance back, and Magic whipped a towel over his head afterward, and the crowd roared, and surely, some wonder if it was worth it, because U.S. teams haven't really been headed since -- although the 2000 team almost got beat in Australia, and a unified Yugoslavian team will be very interesting to watch in Indianapolis at the World Championships later this month. Was the Dream Team an overreaction? I don't think so, but I can't speak for everyone.

All I can tell you is that in all the years I've been doing this, I've never asked a player for an autograph or a picture or a pair of shoes because there are some things that working journalists shouldn't do with or to the people they cover, and that's just what I think. It doesn't make me right or some kind of ethical genius. But I have one picture in an album somewhere, and it's from the press seats at the Palau d'Esports, and it's at halftime of the gold medal game the U.S. men's basketball team would win over Croatia and a young Toni Kukoc, and it's of 12 guys shooting around just before the second half of a game they would win comfortably began, and they were the best team I ever saw.

David Aldridge is an NBA reporter for ESPN.