It says something about Australia’s standing in women’s basketball that the Opals can genuinely claim to have a rivalry with the US.

The Opals have been Australia’s most successful basketball team for more than 20 years now — coincidentally about the time Lauren Jackson arrived on the scene — and in that time have found a way to topple almost every opponent put in front of them.

All except the USA. The mighty USA, the unstoppable USA, the USA which just completed another 21-point victory over Australia, consigning the Opals to a battle for bronze instead of a shot at gold.

It’s been 40 years since an Australian women’s basketball team first played the USA at the Olympic Games. The two nations have met in this arena on eight occasions previously, with the Americans winning all eight — you can now make that nine from nine.

Three of those were in gold medal matches, another in a semifinal and most recently in Tokyo a quarterfinal. It is probably the most significant international rivalry in the women’s game, as these two nations were at the forefront of the rise in the women’s game and played some spiteful and special games around the turn of the century.

But it has been painfully one-sided.

Jackson has had to live through most of those defeats, first as a teenage tyro in Sydney, then as the star of the team and now as its heart and soul. 

Surrounded by young women and players whose careers are just on the verge of taking off, she is a fountain of knowledge while also carrying the scars of all of those crushing losses.

So what’s one more for good measure?

The Opals found themselves down by double-digits inside four minutes of game time. At about the same point, the US had already blocked three shots and made three steals — it was an overpowering, strength and size putting up an impassable roadblock.

The issues were just as pronounced at the other end, with the Opals relying on the Americans missing open shots in order to get a stop.