So the U.S. men’s basketball team won another gold medal at the Olympics.

Excuse me, but wake me up when you have something newsworthy to discuss.

The U.S. sent a star-studded cast of mostly NBA All-Stars to Rio and they did what everyone who knows anything about basketball knew they would do. They stacked the deck and knocked off all comers, beating Serbia by 30 points in the final.

And it wasn’t even that close.

Which is why I’ve never been on board with sending NBA players to the Olympics. We should go back to sending the college kids.

Most of us received more joy seeing a group of college players win gold medal after gold medal while beating the other country’s pro players. Those kiddos were 63-0 in the Olympics before losing to the Soviet Union in the 1972 gold-medal game in a horrific display of late-game officiating.

The U.S. came back and won the gold medal in 1976, then boycotted the 1980 Games before returning to win gold again in 1984.

With no controversy to lean on, the U.S. was upset by the Soviet Union in the quarterfinals of the 1988 Olympics and settled for the bronze, sending the U.S. basketball community in a tizzy.

Then in 1992 – after the distinction between pro and amateur players was eliminated, the door was open for the current trend of parading NBA players to the Olympics.

In ’92 the U.S. sent an NBA contingent of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Clyde Drexler and Chris Mullin to the Olympics. The 12th man was Christian Laettner, who was the third player chosen in the 1992 NBA draft and an All-American out of Duke.

All of those 11 NBA players are in the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame, and Laettner is in the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

The rest of the world could have rounded up its best players and put them all on one team and they still wouldn’t have been able to compete.

Sure, the rest of the world has gotten better at basketball and a lot of them have NBA players. But those countries have always had pro players, and the U.S. still won golds an overwhelming majority of the times.

Basketball was invented here. And as long as the U.S. can get its best college players to participate in the Olympics, it’s always more fun seeing them winning than watching a bunch of overpaid future NBA Hall of Famers yawn their way to another gold medal.

Along the way to claiming this year’s gold medal, the U.S. did have three close calls. One was against Serbia – a contest during pool play that the U.S. won by three points when Serbia missed a chance late in the game to force overtime.

So much drama unfolded leading up to the rematch in Sunday’s gold medal game.

Final score: U.S. 96, Serbia 66.

You had a ton of fun watching that one-sided debacle, didn’t you?

If they wanted to, the U.S. could have won by 60 points. And LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Kawhi Leonard, Russell Westbrook and James Harden were nowhere to be found.

When the U.S. wants to prove a point and shut up its critics, no one can come close to even making a basketball game interesting against them.

No one.

The U.S. is that dominant. It’s worse than stealing candy from a baby.

When the college kids represented the country in the Olympics in men’s basketball, at least the games had some mystery to them.

At least you hunkered down in front of the television in extreme anticipation to watch what was about to unfold.

Now you only have to watch for maybe a half. Then you switch to another channel where you’ll probably have more enjoyment watching reruns of “I Love Lucy.”

Assembling the men’s Olympic basketball tournament is like sending Mike Tyson in his heyday to box somebody at the local YMCA. Or like going to a movie and already knowing how it’s going to end.

Furthermore, if I want to pass the day away by watching a bunch of NBA All-Stars run up and down the court, I can get my annual fix every February during the NBA’s midseason All-Star game.

I, for one, wish there was a way to get the college kids representing the U.S. in the Olympics again, because the NBA players have totally destroyed my Olympic basketball experience.

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