MIES (Switzerland) - Kevin Durant, LeBron James and Stephen Curry.
In the NBA, they are the best players on their teams.
They are locks for the Hall of Fame. The most dominant players of the last 15 years.
They are protagonists on the great stages of the best league, yet they are rivals.
But when it came to representing the USA at the Olympics in France, to borrow the famous words of Alexandre Dumas in "The Three Musketeers", it was all for one and one for all.
"You want to be able to play around great players, great minds, great basketball people that just love the game," James said. "Team USA has always given us that opportunity. Just be around some of the greatest that ever played the game, to see how they work, how they prepare, you see why (they're great)."
Only in the national team can a country's finest all wear the same jersey and fight together.
Only can international basketball give a legendary trio an experience like this, one that each will celebrate for the rest of his life.
"We all pushing the game forward," Durant said. "To hoop with these guys and still be that level, it's a joy being around people like that."
"It's an iconic kind of thing to be able to talk about basketball, life, the way that we can," Curry said. "So it's kind of a time stamp for us, which is dope."
International basketball brings countries' best players together. We have seen that in the Argentina team that won the 2004 Olympic gold medal, one led by Emanuel Ginobili and Luis Scola.
We saw it when Pau Gasol and Juan Carlos Navarro ignited Spain in their run to 2006 FIBA Basketball World Cup glory, and in 2017 when Goran Dragic and Luka Doncic spearheaded Slovenia's title charge at the FIBA EuroBasket in Istanbul, and Spain again when Ricky Rubio, Marc Gasol and Rudy Fernandez fired the Spanish to a second World Cup triumph in 2019.
"You want to be able to play around great players, great minds, great basketball people that just love the game. Team USA has always given us that opportunity."
We saw it in 2023, when Dennis Schroder, Franz and Mo Wagner and Andreas Obst united so Germany could lift their most famous piece of hardware, the Naismith Trophy, at the World Cup in Manila.
These incredible moments happen in international basketball.
Durant, James and Curry will agree that the 2024 Olympics was spectacular from start to finish.
The Opening Ceremony was on the Seine, allowing this triumvirate to breathe in the beauty and history of Paris by cruising past sites like Notre-Dame, the Louvre, Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower.
On the court, they joined forces to help the USA navigate the most competitive Olympic tournament field of all time.
James was astounding and was voted MVP of the Olympics. Curry, playing at the Olympics for the first time, joined him in the All-Star Five after a spectacular last two games when he hit a combined 17 of 26 (65.4%) from 3-point range. He finished with 36 points in a 95-91 come-from-behind triumph over Serbia in their Semi-Final, and 24 in the 98-87 win over France. He made all four of his shots from deep in the final 3 minutes of the Gold Medal Game.
The prospect of facing teams like Serbia, who have an icon in Nikola Jokic, and France, who have the brightest young talent in basketball in Victor Wembanyama, could cause a player to have a restless night before.
However, by playing alongside Durant, the USA's most important player at the preceding two Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, and another superstar in Curry, James had no problem getting his winks in.
"To have this moment," he said, "where you can sleep damn good at night, knowing who you linked up with the next days, you cherish it."
FIBA