The women of Team Japan’s basketball team were on a run. They upset Belgium, and then France. The shorter but swifter Japanese moved the ball around, played hounding defense, and shot threes with ease. They were the darling of this year’s Games for Japan, heading into a unexpected gold-medal match with Team USA.

The Americans had not lost an Olympic match since 1992, and they did not lose on Sunday, this final day of the XXXII Olympiad. But Team Japan won silver, and the hearts of millions of young women who saw that hard work and teamwork can take you places you never dreamed.

Tokyo2020 has been a watershed Games for Japanese female athletes. Not since the 2000 Olympics had Japanese women won more medals than the men, and in those Sydney Games, Japan garnered only 18.

In these Tokyo Games, Japan won a record 58 medals, and the women won a majority of them – 30!

Japanese female judoka and wrestlers won a combined 8 gold medals. Risako Kawai won gold in freestyle wrestling, joining her sister Yukako as the second set of Japanese siblings to win gold. (Hifumi and Uta Abe both won gold in judo.) Risako won gold at the 2016 Rio Games at the 63kg and below weight class, but she dropped a level with the hope that the sisters would both triumph in Tokyo. They did.

Judoka Akira Sone won Japan’s 16th gold medal in the +78kg weight class. She was also on the mixed team that lost to France, the only one on her team to win in the Mixed competition. She won handily in fact, a rock among the judo greats on Team Japan.

And Japanese women won their first gold and bronze medals in boxing. Was there anyone more joyful than Sena Irie? When she entered the stadium for the gold medal match, she was smiling like she walked into a surprise birthday party. And after peppering her opponent with swift jabs and a flurry of combinations, she won, jumping high in the air with glee.

Japanese women are bad-ass strong!

The male swimmers have been the more likely  medalists for Japan, but this time Yui Ohashi won gold in the grueling 400 and 200-meter individual medley competitions, the only Japanese to win swimming gold.

Hideki Matsuyama was the Masters Champion heading into the Olympics, but it was Mone Inami who medaled with a second place finish.

And girl power was on display in skateboarding. A few days after 13-year-old Momiji Nishiya won gold in women’s street skateboarding,  19-year-old Sakura Yosozumi and 12-year-old Kokona Hiraki took gold and silver in the women’s park skateboarding.

Japanese women had a chance at a sweep in park skateboarding when 15-year old Misugu Okamoto, the number one seed, set up for her final run. If she could only execute her final big trick, she could have climbed above Great Britain’s Sky Brown who was in third, but she couldn’t execute.

In one of the most heartfelt images of the Games, her teammates and competitors rallied around Okamoto as the cameras captured them group hugging and lifting the tearful teen into the air.

There’s a good chance that sales of skateboards by teenage girls in Japan are up.

There’s a good chance too a lot more girls in Japan are thinking, “I can do that!”