The men’s U.S. Olympic basketball team didn’t lose in Rio, including a 30-point victory in the gold medal game against Serbia. But international domination on the hardwood has come to be expected from Team USA’s NBA-star-studded squads.

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That wasn’t the case in the 1972 Summer Olympics when only amateurs could play on America’s national team and the best U.S. college basketball players were evenly enough matched against the Soviet Union--a team of older professional players--that the gold medal game came down to the wire.

But the way that game ended remains for the U.S. players involved and American basketball fans, even 44 years later, painful, controversial and hard to accept.

“I think it’s probably one of the most, if not the most, extreme controversies in Olympic history,” were the words Tom McMillen, a former Maryland basketball All-American, Rhodes Scholar, NBA alum, three-term Congressman and member of the 1972 U.S. Olympic team, used to describe the game in an exclusive interview with TSR. “I can’t figure it out but it just seems like this game was in the hands of others. The powers that be determined that we would lose if it was close and that’s exactly what happened. I’ve played a lot of basketball games in my life and I’ve never seen a game so screwed up. And this was the World Championship.”

Late at night on September 10, 1972, in Munich, Germany, the men’s Olympic basketball gold medal came down to a game between the Soviet Union and the United States. It was two of the world’s most powerful countries fighting for basketball supremacy, which had belonged to America up to that point. Doing so in the midst of the Cold War only added to the drama.

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Struggling through a slow-paced game, Team USA trailed the Soviets 26-21 at halftime. Despite having a much younger team and the potential to run the Soviets back to Russia, the U.S. opted to play more of a half-court style that didn’t utilize its strengths and played into what the opposition wanted to do. Down by eight points with just over six minutes left in the game, the American players decided to switch tactics. They started playing up-tempo and the Soviet’s lead began to slip.

In the game’s last half-minute, the Americans had cut the lead to one before Team USA guard Doug Collins intercepted a pass and started a fast break that resulted in a hard foul as he attempted a layup, sending him to the line for two shots. Despite taking a tumble that left him lying on the court under the rim for several minutes, the 21-year-old Collins, with all the poise in the world, was able to get to his feet and sink both free throws, giving Team USA a 50-49 lead with three seconds left on the clock.

But then the chaos began.

On the ensuing inbound, the Soviets passed the ball in as their coaches frantically called for a timeout. Initially, the timeout was granted with one second left in the game, however, the referees convened and decided to reset the clock back to three seconds.

As the time was being changed by the scorer’s table, one referee hurried to start play. Almost immediately as the Soviets inbounded for a second time the final buzzer went off and the game ended as American fans, players and coaches stormed the court.

Those few minutes of celebration would be the only time the 1972 U.S. men’s basketball team felt what it was like to win a gold medal.

The game clock hadn’t been reset to three seconds before the inbound attempt and as the P.A. announcer tried to relay the information and clear the court, the Soviets got set for a third chance to win the game.

“When Doug Collins made those two free throws--we came from behind and those were such pressure-packed free throws--we really thought we were going to win this thing,” McMillen said. “The Soviets were taking the ball out under the basket. They started the first play and the clock got stopped. They started again, they failed again. Only on the third time, when once again the clock was being reset, we started to think this is crazy, we’re just playing the same play over and over again.”

McMillen was assigned to guard the ball on the third inbound but was unable to press the passer due to a referee’s erroneous command.

“I was on the ball and the official kept telling me to back up off the line,” McMillen said. “With his hand, he was telling me to get away from the line because he didn’t speak English. It really wasn’t appropriate for him to do that because under international rules as long as the player had room to go back you do not need to get off the ball. So I couldn't understand what he was doing to me, telling me to get off the ball. But then again, you couldn’t risk a technical foul. It would have been ridiculous to let the game go this far and then decide it like that.”

With McMillen having to back out of the way, the Soviets now had a clear lane to make a pass down court. Center Alexander Belov caught a long pass just underneath the American basket and laid the ball in as time expired to give the Soviet Union a 51-50 win.

The subsequent scene was the reversal of what had happened a few moments earlier and it was now the Soviets elated with joy on the court as they celebrated winning an Olympic gold medal.

To this day, McMillen has a hard time coming up with the words to describe his emotions in that moment, but rather than feeling like they lost, he and his former teammates simply feel cheated.

“It’s not exactly like losing a tough game,” McMillen said. “When you lose a tough game fair and square, you walk away and say, I didn’t get the job done. In this case, we really don’t feel that way. We feel like we did get the job done. I still think there was some duplicity there but we still haven’t figured out why this went down. It was so out of order. It’d be like the commissioner of the NBA coming down and resetting the clock time and time again during the championship.”

The bitter U.S. team protested the unjust decision and unanimously voted to not accept the silver medal.

“After the game, we went into the locker room and talked about it and my teammates were pretty firm on this,” McMillen said. “They didn’t want to accept a silver medal. To this day, we’ve even talked about petitioning for a dual-gold medal and they’re not even interested in that. It’s either singular gold or nothing.

“If we had accepted the silver medal, it probably would have died at that. People wouldn’t still be writing about it. But the fact that it’s one of the most controversial games of all time, I think it’s a testament to the fact that we stood up and said we’re not going to take this stuff.”

The U.S. basketball team was robbed of a gold medal, but that wasn’t nearly the most tragic event at the Munich games.

Just days before the gold medal game was played, Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic Village and took members of the Israeli team hostage, which ultimately resulted in 9 Israeli athletes and two coaches being killed.

“It was a very traumatic games in a lot of ways,” McMillen said. “Here you had really the start of modern terrorism and you had our event, which was riddled with controversy. So it was pretty crazy.”

McMillen is still haunted by Team USA’s loss in the 1972 gold medal game, but he also realizes that there are those who lost much more than a game during those infamous Summer Olympics.

“The terroristic attack was tragic,” McMillen said. “You had to feel for the Israeli families that went through that. In the scheme of things, a basketball game isn’t very important compared to what happened on that world stage.”