It was 1 in the morning. They were flummoxed by a safe. Jordan hadn't opened it in years, and he couldn't remember the combination. Everything else stopped as this consumed him. After 10 failed attempts, the safe would go into a security shutdown and need to be blown open. None of the usual numbers worked. Nine different combinations failed; they had one try left. Jordan focused. He decided it had to be a combination of his birthday, Feb. 17, and old basketball numbers. He typed in six digits: 9, 2, 1, 7, 4, 5. Click. The door swung open and he reached in, rediscovering his gold medal from the 1984 Olympics. It wasn't really gold anymore. It looked tarnished, changed -- a duller version of itself.

Twenty years after The Dream Team dominated unlike any other sports team in Olympic history, NBA TV's behind the scenes look at the squad brought back many moments of nostalgia. The documentary entitled The Dream Team, narrated by Edward Burns, began by looking at the history of Olympic basketball, including how the Soviet Union team won the gold in 1972 and 1988 just when it seemed like the Americans'amateur players were good enough to win the gold every year.

Michael Jordan claimed the NBA Slam Dunk 1988 championship after beating Dominique Wilkins. Needing 49 points to capture his second straight slam dunk title, Jordan headed to the opposite end of the floor to the delight of the Chicago fans. They knew what was coming. A la Dr. J., Jordan took off running, lifted off from the free throw line, double clutched in midair and slammed it down for the perfect score and the slam dunk title. "I looked up into the box seats and came across the guy who started it all, Dr. J," Jordan said. "He told me to go back all the way, go the length of the floor, then take off from the free-throw line. And I did it."

In those days it was rare for sophomores to make varsity. Herring made one exception in 1978, one designed to remedy his team's height disadvantage. This is part of the reason Mike Jordan went home and cried in his room after reading the two lists. It wasn't just that his name was missing from the varsity roster. It was also that as he scanned the list he saw the name of another sophomore, one of his close friends, the 6'7" Leroy Smith. Over the next three decades Jordan would become a world-class collector of emotional wounds, a champion grudge-holder, a magician at converting real and imagined insults into the rocket fuel that made him fly. If he had truly been cut that year, as he would claim again and again, he wouldn't have had such an immediate chance for revenge. But in fact his name was on the second list, the jayvee roster, with the names of many of his fellow sophomores. Jordan quickly became a jayvee superstar.