Mike Krzyzewski always had resisted the temptation to leave Duke for the jobs where another coach cast the longest shadow, where someone already staked his claim to that bench’s gold standard. Through the years, he has turned down UCLA, the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers, leaving John Wooden, Red Auerbach and Pat Riley to be the forever faces of those places.

He waited for the right job, the right time and he still never had to leave the court named for him inside Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Now, Krzyzewski has a chance to go down as America’s Olympic men’s basketball coach. In the past, people have remembered the coaches who didn’t win the gold medal. History remembers Henry Iba in 1972, and John Thompson in 1988, and Larry Brown in 2004. Now, Coach K gives himself the chance to be the forever face of the red, white and blue of basketball.

In Las Vegas, where Team USA is holding its tryout camp and practices prior to next month’s World Championships in Japan, Krzyzewski is deepening one of this sport’s most brilliant legacies.

For the longest time, coaching the U.S. Olympic team always has been a losing proposition, a job that brought far more shame in failure than glory in gold. The repeated failures of American basketball in international competition, punctuated with the U.S. struggling to salvage a bronze medal at the Athens Games in 2004, has made for the most unique of opportunities for Krzyzewski.

The U.S. Olympic basketball program needs an overhaul, needs a vision, a leader for the Beijing Games in two years. Now, everything you’re hearing out of those practices and meetings this past week in the desert, every way that this young roster sounds like it’s buying into a three-summer commitment of world championships and training camps on the way to Beijing, tells so much about how Coach K was born, bred and groomed to coach this team.

This time, USA Basketball is doing it right. The biggest thing the U.S. gets with Krzyzewski over the Athens disaster with Brown is genuine, true leadership.

Brown was so consumed with absolving himself of blame for losing, he never invested the commitment it took for winning. His players weren’t stupid. They knew that Brown started distancing himself from roster the moment the team gathered together in 2004. He kept tearing down the team, trying to sculpt an end-game that would see him as a genius for winning with them and blameless if he lost.

A transparent ploy, it enraged everyone from NBA commissioner David Stern to USA Basketball officials to the players.

With Coach K, that’ll never happen. Maybe the U.S. won’t win the gold in two years, but it won’t happen with its coach throwing everyone else overboard.

Right now, though, you have to like the U.S.’ chances in Beijing. Mike Krzyzewski has two years to keep building and building this thing, to sell his team, our team, on something bigger than itself. No one does that better in basketball. Yes, you’ve got to like America’s chances for gold now, and the coach’s for truly separating himself in history.