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On the last day of the 2003 Asian Basketball Championships, the play at the Tianrun Ice Skating Arena in Harbin, about a day's bus ride from the Siberian border, is what it's been like all week: dull. So many turnovers, so many fouls, a heavily favored Chinese team leading South Korea by so many points -- it's almost, well, pointless.

And then there is a moment.

Late in the third quarter, Yao Ming blocks a shot, a giant swat that stops a brief South Korean rally. But it's not the block so much as the fist-pump that follows. Short, quick, almost brusque, it is an exclamation point at the end of a sentence that says, "Eat it!"

A stun-gun jolt rips through the crowd. They've played basketball in China as long as anybody, as far back as Naismith. But if you want to know why the game is suddenly revolutionary here, just listen to the reaction of the crowd, the way it breaks into pieces -- not a chant, in unison, generated by the dutiful masses, but the spontaneous exuberance of 5,000 individual voices.

This is the New China, where the once-forbidden "capitalist road" is now a superhighway, and revolutions are midair 360s in the lane. Basketball is cool. And what's coolest about it is its American-ness. Guys in Lakers jerseys slice to the hole on street courts in Shanghai, kids break-dance in front of fake graffiti at the Capital Gym in Beijing. From Hong Kong to the Gobi Desert, everyone seems to know about Allen Iverson's tattoo (the Chinese character for "loyal").

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