Larry Brown now stands on the top rung of basketball coaching as the only man to win both the NCAA and NBA championships. He already has gold medals as an Olympic player and assistant.

Should he win the gold medal this summer in Athens as the head coach of the U.S. basketball team, Brown would complete an unprecedented Olympic triple.

And since he’s already in the Basketball Hall of Fame, you’d have to wonder: What’s left for Larry Brown to do?

Nothing. He will have done it all. Larry Brown will be seated at the same dais with Red Auerbach, John Wooden, Hank Iba, Adolph Rupp, Dean Smith, Bobby Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, etc.

And so people will ask Larry: “Are you going to retire?” Because that’s the question they always ask when some coach or manager in his fifties or sixties wins something big: “Are you going to retire?”

The assumption being: Your career can’t go any higher than this. It may not ever get this big again. Don’t you think you might as well get out now, before you start losing and end up tarnishing this memory like Joe Paterno?

Larry, don’t do it.

If Phil Jackson wants to retire, let Phil Jackson retire. Don’t you do it. Don’t make the same mistake Dick Vermeil did when he retired a few days after winning the Super Bowl with the Rams.

Vermeil knew almost immediately he had made the wrong decision — that by retiring, he was living out someone else’s script, not his own. Vermeil was lucky to get back into coaching as quickly as he did because he was already deep into his sixties.

Don’t make the same mistake Bill Parcells did when he retired from coaching the Jets a few years ago. Parcells said he was done. Obviously, he wasn’t.

Don’t make the same mistake Chuck Daly did. Daly went to the Nets directly from winning two NBA championships with Detroit and winning the gold medal with the Dream Team in 1992. Just two years later, at 64, Daly quit, saying he was burned out. But three years later Daly came back with Orlando.

Fighters fight. Coaches coach.

At 63, Larry might feel this is the right time to get out. Win or lose in Athens, he will be toast next season; he won’t have enough time to recover physically from nine hard months of the NBA season and two more for the Olympics.

Those thick veins around his eyes that bulge when he’s tired will be bulging by training camp in September. By December he’ll be wishing he had quit. So why not do it now? Because he’d be back in a week.

I’m not saying Larry will stay in Detroit. I’ve watched him leave too many jobs — too many good jobs — to guarantee he’ll stay in Detroit. Look, he left Kansas right after he won the national championship. What was that about?

He’s always wanted to coach the North Carolina team; he’d walk barefoot through broken glass to do that. For years after leaving UCLA job, he wanted that job back.

There’s no telling whether Larry will remain with the Pistons. He’s the vagabond genius of basketball coaching. He has coached two colleges and eight pro teams.

He has coached in every time zone. I figure Larry has two or three stops before son L.J. goes to high school, and brings along the greatest basketball coach in the country.