BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 14 : Magic Is Never Without an Audience : Basketball: He has become the game’s best salesman. And the world has become his showroom.

When the tree began to move, Magic Johnson kept talking. He has loved this dream thing. By winning the Olympics, he said, “my library can be closed.” His scrapbooks are heavy with victory from Pop Warner League to the NBA. Only the world has eluded his grasp, and now, in one more game, even the planet belongs to him. Naturally, caught up in global conquest, he didn’t notice a tree walking toward him.

And then the tree spoke to Johnson. It said: “Magic, please say something for Mexico.”

On closer inspection, the voice belonged to a radio reporter whose microphone arm reached through an eight-foot potted tree outside the Dream Team’s locker room. The radio man shoved aside tree limbs to get a peek at the great man’s face and record Magic’s message to Mexico:

“I haven’t been there before, but tell ‘em to hang in there, and what’s happening?”

What’s happening here is Barcelona dreamin’, one more game in these Olympics that forever will be the Dream Team’s.

And the Dream Team is Magic’s show. Maybe he will never play again. His valedictory would excite anyone. Maybe it’s that he yet is a sensational player whose work is beyond compare. Or maybe it’s the idea of the stricken hero rising to battle against fate.

Whatever, Magic Johnson has made these Olympics his, and they come to a glorious end tonight when the U.S. basketball team waxes Croatia and takes its place on the gold-medal platform--with six Dreams wearing their award-ceremony uniforms in a way that obscures a logo and preserves the sanctity of their clothing contracts in conflict with U.S. Olympic Committee clothing contracts.

Not that Magic would accept such presumption of victory. Never mind the Americans’ 103-70 victory over Croatia a week ago. Never mind that the Croatian coach, Petar Skansi, conceded victory to the United States two days before tipoff.

Johnson isn’t celebrating just yet. “We’ve got one game left,” he said after the United States won by 51 points over Lithuania. Then this Magical sentence, delivered with a straight face: “We have to play better than this.”

Well, it is true that, so far, the Dream Team has not shut out anyone.

And it has missed the occasional shot.

But even granting these failures, the U.S. team is so far ahead of the world in every basketball category from Clyde Drexler’s quickness to Charles Barkley’s trashtalk that Marcel Souza, the veteran Brazil forward, puts the distance in decades.

“They are the teachers, and we are honored to be their students,” Souza said. “In 40, 50 years, we will catch up. My grandchildren will see it.”

The wonder is that, instead of creating losers angry at their subjugation, the U.S. team has mesmerized every witness with performances of both fundamental skills and unimagined flights of creativity. Quoth Magic: “The world has been captivated.”

Even as the Dream Team left Lithuania breathless in a second-half run that included a rompin’ monster Barkley behind-the-back pass to Jordan for an “I’ll dunk, no I’ll float under and spin it back off the board impossibly” layup, even then a Lithuanian benchwarmer, Arturas Karnisovas, brought out his camera to take pictures. One imagines the old man Karnisovas turning the pages of his scrapbook and saying: “Here, my grandchildren, is Mikhail Jordan. In the Olympics when I was a boy, I touched his shirt. It was number 9.”

At game’s end, the Lithuanians stopped the Americans leaving the court and gathered every player and coach for a group portrait. As Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe has said, the world’s reaction to the Dream Team has been direct: “Beat me, whip me, take my picture.”

As if the Dream Team were hermetic rock stars, a Spanish newspaper stationed a photographer on a rooftop across the way to get pictures of the players by poolside. The pictures suggested a family picnic, with fathers and mothers tending their young.

Of the few people not entranced by the goings-on, the most voluble is Barkley, the team’s perpetual motion mouth. Asked if he were bored by the work here, he said: “No joke. It gets very difficult. I want to get this thing over with.”

The most difficult part of the Olympics, Barkley said, has been dealing with questions about the team’s decision to stay in a luxury hotel rather than in the athletes’ village, with its spartan existence.

“I’m a black millionaire,” Barkley said. “I live where I want. I can buy a hotel.”

For Magic Johnson, a more graceful millionaire than Barkley, the two weeks in Barcelona have been heaven-sent. Although a minor knee injury reduced his playing time in three games, Johnson played well against Lithuania, saying: “I’m so happy I finally got to do my thing.”

The Magic thing is wonderful and not limited to what we see on the court. Before the game, he said: “I went to Michael and told him, ‘I don’t want you to be Michael Jordan, I need you to be Air Jordan.’ ”

So in the first 90 seconds of that Lithuania night, Jordan made a steal and two 20-foot jump shots, and Johnson threw in a three-pointer. It soon was 11-0 on its way to 34-8. The Dreams were sweet.

Barely had the Mexican radio tree ended its interview of Johnson before a man heavy with perspiration shoved his microphone in. We stood in a corner of an interview area, 30 people in space for 10. The perspiring reporter said: “Magic, say something for the people of Poland.”

“Hello to all the Polish people,” Johnson said, smiling as if these were words he had waited all these years to say.

“Tell them about NBA basketball,” the reporter said.

Magic Johnson said: “NBA basketball is fan -tastic.”