How ‘the other dream team’ in Barcelona has inspired Dublin Inter mission

For two weeks in 1992, a US team of NBA superstars spearheaded by Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson destroyed all before them at an Olympic Games notable for the fact that it was the first since the collapse of the Berlin War.

Among those nations flying their own flag and wearing their own colours for the first time in over half a century was Lithuania, and their basketball team would return to the Baltics with a bronze medal and to a nation enraptured. Two years ago, the story of how they did it — and secured the friendship and funds of a motley crew of supporters that included the rock band the Grateful Dead — was made into a documentary entitled ‘The Other Dream Team’.

As with all great sports stories, it swept far beyond the confines of a mere court or pitch. This was about history, about a nation’s emergence from oppression and how one team told their story to the world simply by shooting hoops. “Basketball allowed the nation to forget atrocities that happened to their families,” the film’s director Marius Markevicius, US-born but of Lithuanian descent, told The Huffington Post two years ago.