THE SEOUL GAMES / DAY 13 : Women’s Basketball : U.S. Team Saves Day, Takes Gold With a 77-70 Win Over Yugoslavia

With one last light flickering in the window of U.S. Olympic basketball, its women stepped up Thursday and spread a warm glow all over the program.

It was half of what the program had come for--two golds--but in basketball, as in life, you take what you can get.

For the second time in this tournament, the U.S. women drilled Yugoslavia. It wasn’t as one-sided as their first 101-74 blowout, but Thursday’s 77-70 victory marched the American women to the top level of the victory stand and meant that those trumpets were sounding for them.

Did this program need it now?

Funereal would be one way of describing spirits around the U.S. federation, after Wednesday’s loss by the men to the Soviets. Shocked would work. Dumbstruck wouldn’t be bad, either.

The men don’t attend women’s games--they’re too busy concentrating on their next mission--but the women came to the men’s game.

And died inside.

“I was hurt,” said Cynthia Cooper, a former USC star. “I was crushed. I really was.

“I really wanted us to win double gold, like ’84. I really wanted the men to feel what we’re feeling now.

“Watching that game, it didn’t really scare us. It kinda woke us up. But any basketball team can be beaten on any day.”

Of course, like the men, the women had been warned about overconfidence every hour on the hour, but even so, weren’t they a little surprised to watch the men fall?

“A little,” said Anne Donovan, the veteran center. “We’ve watched our men struggle, the way they’ve worked, worked, worked all summer. In every athlete’s mind, you think, ‘All that hard work has to pay off.’

“Everybody kept talking about Brazil last year in the Pan-Ams, and when they defeated Brazil, it was like the monkey was off their backs. They could just go out and cut loose.”

Of course, the men’s program, unlike the women’s, was always deadly earnest.

Maybe the men succumbed to the pressure that the women concede they feel, too?

“I don’t think the pressure got to ‘em,” Cooper said. “I think they just had a bad game.

“On a basketball team with so much talent, you never have that one leader who you can turn to if you need a basket or a rebound and an assist.”

That should have been Danny Manning for the men, but it wasn’t set up that way. Manning got into foul trouble and wound up scoreless.

That is Teresa Edwards among the women.

In any close game, she steps up, without urging, prodding or peer. It was 51-44 in Thursday’s second half when Edwards kicked it up into that famous higher gear of hers, scoring 8 fast points as the U.S. team went up, 58-46.

After that, the women mopped up until the horn blew, certifying their championship. Edwards, one of the retiring veterans, jumped into the arms of another, Donovan.

How sweet is it for them?

The men are mostly going home to million-dollar contracts and National Basketball Assn. careers.

The women will laugh all the way home . . . and disperse to the four corners of the earth.

There is no surviving professional women’s league in the United States, and so the 6-8 Anne Donovan, who was an object of curiosity in a Japanese league for 5 years, will now move to Italy.

“It’s sad we have to go out and play like that, in other countries,” said Edwards, who scored 18 points in her farewell to international play.

“We like representing the United States, wearing that red, white and blue. That was the greatest feeling in my life.”

They can be proud of their tenures. With such players as Lynette Woodard and Cheryl Miller, they have transformed the game, from an ocean dominated by the Soviets and 7-2 Ulyana Semenova, into an American lake.

Once the plaything of foreign hulks, the game is now a race, belonging to the swiftest, the most athletic . . . and the Americans.

Donovan said: “It’s been great watching these teams, from the days when it was us studying the Europeans, when we felt like we were playing catch-up, trying to learn their game, to the world watching us, studying our game, trying to play our transition game, trying to catch up to us.

“We’re the dominant team now.”

Said Edwards: “I don’t care if we don’t ever win another gold medal. I care, but . . . if we don’t win another gold, I’ll be happy with what we’ve accomplished.”

And so as they prepare to go home, and to repack their suitcases and board those flights for those lonely outposts on the frontier of women’s basketball, remember what they did. They came, they saw, they had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and conquered. They did it right.