Shaquille O'Neal became "The Big Champion," then stayed stateside as the U.S. men's basketball team almost became "The Big Disaster" at the Sydney Games.

 O'Neal loomed large in the world of professional basketball in 2000 -- when he was around and when he wasn't.

 After finishing just one vote shy of becoming the first unanimous MVP in NBA history, O'Neal finally got the championship that had been eluding him throughout his career.

 It wasn't easy. The Lakers had to stage an improbable fourth-quarter comeback to get past Portland in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals. They then outlasted the pesky, Hack-a-Shaq-minded Indiana Pacers in six games in the NBA Finals.

 When O'Neal's quest finally ended on a June night in Los Angeles, he ran to his family, hugged them and started spilling tears.

 "I've waited eight years of my life for this to happen, and it finally happened," O'Neal said before disappearing for the rest of a summer that turned out to be a lot more exciting than people expected.

 All it took was a U.S. Olympic team that could have used someone with O'Neal's 7-foot-1 body.

 The team of NBA players nearly suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in the history of the sport. It happened in the semifinal round when a young team from Lithuania kept matching the Americans shot for shot and stop for stop.

 For the final 15 minutes, no more than three points separated the two teams. All around Sydney, people dropped what they were doing and turned to the television to see whether a monumental upset was in the making.

 Only after Sarunas Jasikevicius missed a 3-pointer at the buzzer did the U.S. team escape with a two-point victory.

 "As a coach, this has been the most difficult thing I've done," Rudy Tomjanovich said. "I won two world championships, one from the sixth seed, which no one else has ever done, and this was more difficult. The weight of the world is on you, everybody is expecting these teams to roll over for you, and that's just not the way it is."

 The Americans might not have had such a difficult time if O'Neal or his Lakers teammate, Kobe Bryant, had agreed to play for the national team.

 O'Neal, who won gold with the '96 team in Atlanta, said it was time for someone else to lead the Olympians, while Bryant also begged off, saying he needed to plan for his upcoming wedding.

 Without them, no one stepped up to assume the leadership role, to do what Michael Jordan might have done -- assert his will, fire up the team and refuse to allow any opponent even to believe it had a chance.

 None of the 12 players on the U.S. roster had won an NBA or NCAA championship. Only two, Gary Payton and Allan Houston, had played in the league finals, and another, Vince Carter, was harshly criticized for his aggressive antics Down Under.

 It was quite a change from the adulation Carter received back in February when he turned All-Star weekend into three days of Vinsanity.

 Carter won the slam-dunk contest with a phenomenal performance highlighted by his very first dunk, which included a 360-degree midair spin that increased the degree of difficulty by going to his right instead of his left.

 When he made the dunk, he turned to the television cameras and mouthed the words, "It's over!"

 Unfortunately for Carter, his brightest moment of the year was over, too.

 Carter's team, the Toronto Raptors, was swept from the playoffs in the first round by the New York Knicks to set up yet another Eastern Conference death match between the Knicks and the Miami Heat.

 Like the three previous Miami-New York series, this one lived up to its billing. It went down to the final seconds of Game 7, the Knicks winning with the help of a disputed call.

 New York didn't have much left for the Pacers, who knocked them out in six games and made it to the finals for Larry Bird's last games as a coach.

 But with a lineup that didn't have the bulk to handle O'Neal or the late-game heroics to match Bryant, the Pacers couldn't keep the Lakers from winning the franchise's first title since the Showtime days of the '80s.

 The 2000-01 season began with a downer when Alonzo Mourning, who had helped the U.S. team win gold in Sydney, announced that a rare kidney disorder would force him to miss the season.

 His absence further weakened an Eastern Conference that was depleted of big-man talent by the offseason trades of longtime Knick Patrick Ewing to Seattle and Shawn Kemp and Dale Davis to Portland.

 Almost two full months into the season, nobody is expecting whatever team comes out of the East to have much of a chance against the champion from the West.

 Then again, a year ago there weren't many people predicting a championship for O'Neal and a near-disaster for the Olympic team.