U.S. women’s Olympic basketball team has been dreamy too

LONDON — It might be the best-kept secret in England.

The U.S. women’s basketball team has won 33 consecutive games in the Olympics, not to mention the last four gold medals, and nobody will talk about it.

While their highly popular peers on the U.S. men’s team go for, ahem, only a second consecutive gold medal, the women go about their business without attracting attention to it.

It starts with Coach Geno Auriemma, who for all his success at the University of Connecticut — seven national championships since 1995 — has never been head coach of an Olympic gold-medal team. He coached the Huskies to 90 consecutive victories on the way to titles in 2009 and 2010, but this is a different level.

This is international. This is 33 games in a row spread out over 20 years.

“If you don’t talk about the streak, if you don’t dwell on it, if you don’t harp on it, then it really doesn’t exist except in the mind of other people,” Auriemma said. “We’ve not talked about it one time. Not one time.”

The U.S. begins its Olympic schedule Saturday against Croatia and will be heavily favored throughout the competition.

Fine with Auriemma.

“At Connecticut, fortunately or unfortunately, the perception is that we’re going to win every game,” he said. “I don’t like being the underdog. I’d rather win. It’s like cards. I want to have four aces right off the bat and beat everybody.”

The U.S. hasn’t lost in the Olympics since a 1992 setback against the Unified Team, the former Soviet Union squad.

The USSR was still trying to figure out its newly slimmed-down shape — minus Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania — the last time the U.S. lost.

It will take an unexpectedly strong movement this year to unseat Team USA, which won all four of its tuneup games this month by an average of 33 points.

While the men’s team has one huge divot in its fairway over the last four Olympics — a bronze medal in the 2004 Games — the women have been flawless over the same stretch but never get a share of hyperbolic coverage.

“I think you’ve got to be careful when it comes to how you judge yourself based on what media covers,” U.S. forward Maya Moore told reporters. “But we also are going to fight for more coverage and make sure people get a chance to see us because we feel like we are doing some really cool things out there on the court. We are doing some things that have never been seen before.

“Hopefully we will make some strides with this Olympics … not to take anything away from our men — because we love watching them; we love supporting them and cheering them on.”

If Auriemma ever fired up his Connecticut team by trotting out the old us-against-the-world rallying cry, he could use it again on a larger stage if desired.

Auriemma coached six of the 12 U.S. players at Connecticut: Moore, Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Tina Charles, Swin Cash and Asjha Jones, a nod to the prowess of the Huskies’ program.

“We’re all very, very familiar with each other,” Auriemma said. “The other six that didn’t play for me [at Connecticut], we certainly played against them enough times that they know what’s going on.”

Cash, Bird, Taurasi and Jones were on the Connecticut team that won the 2002 national championship with ease against Oklahoma, 82-70. More recently, Charles and Moore were part of the 2009 and 2010 national championships.

“Looking back now that I’ve graduated, it’s kind of like, wow, that was insane what we did,” said Moore, the top overall draft pick in the 2011 WNBA draft.

“Hopefully it’ll be the same thing when I’ve played my last USA basketball game. I can look back and say, ‘That was an amazing time.’”

mike.bresnahan@latimes.com

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