HOW do you call winning an Olympic silver medal disappointing? Perhaps when you already own two of them, and thought this time it was your time. We all really thought that after a couple of practice runs, this time the Opals would finally shake the monkey from their shoulders and beat the United States in an Olympic gold medal final.

We were all wrong. Fleetingly in the first quarter, things looked good. But so quickly it changed, and by half-time the Opals were staring at their third silver in a row.

Outgoing coach Jan Stirling conceded they had been the least prepared team ever to leave home soil when it came to the amount of time they spent together, the result of all but one player plying their trade in foreign competitions. They had managed to win their way through a little unconvincingly to the gold medal game, but were quickly found out by a far superior US team.

Whatever chance they may have had of gold probably disappeared when Penny Taylor crashed to the floor with an ankle injury in the quarter-final. She returned for the final, but was nothing like the Penny Taylor considered one of the superstars of women's basketball.

She said after the game that the focus turned straight to 2012 … that's a long time to stare at all those silver medals.

While they were never tipped to reach the same heights as the Opals, the Boomers were looking to make a move on the world stage at these Games.

Coming off a disappointing ninth in Athens, coach Brian Goorjian planned to do better with his squad of experienced internationals and the next generation of Boomers.

The results will show they finished as losing quarter-finalists, but there was so much more to the Boomers in Beijing. The reality was if they had found some form earlier, they would probably have headed home with a medal.

A winnable game against Croatia was lost. They discovered their mojo in time to beat European powers Russia and Lithuania, and still only managed fourth. But they showed enough to suggest their future is bright.