Joel Embiid was his best when Team USA needed him most. He can carry the Sixers in the same way.

PARIS — In the wake of the best night of his basketball life, Joel Embiid was walking tall through an exit area of Bercy Arena on Thursday, slapping hands with Anthony Edwards, toweling off his sweat-sopped face, as at ease as he ever gets or has ever been.

The 7 minutes and 11 seconds of game time that changed everything for him in these Olympics, that maybe could be the beginning of a new and better phase of his career with the 76ers, had passed. The sight of Embiid so buoyant brought to mind dozens of regular-season NBA games, when he’d been marvelous and the Sixers had won and his world would be perfect until the postseason began. Except this 95-91 semifinal victory over Serbia had been as important, as much of a gut-tester, as any playoff game that any member of Team USA had experienced, and Embiid had handled himself about as well as anyone not named Steph Curry. Nineteen points, four rebounds, a big blocked shot, and that 7:11 fourth-quarter stretch when he, Curry, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant carried the Americans to complete a 17-point comeback.

Embiid, for his part, downplayed the comparison between a late-series playoff game and this win-or-settle-for-bronze thrill ride that was shaping up to be one of the biggest upsets in Olympic history. “Two totally separate things,” he said. “You’re playing with some of the best players who have ever played the game tonight with Steph, LeBron, KD. Everybody has had to do different things. Like I said from the beginning, this is a learning experience for me — sit back, do the little things, and when you’re needed, do what you have to do.”

For the record, here is what Embiid did once he reentered Thursday’s game with 7:19 left in regulation and the U.S. down eight: He dropped in a pull-up jump shot with 5:52 to go to make it 82-77. He softly banked in an and-one with 5 minutes left, then sank the free throw: Serbia 84, Team USA 80. On the next U.S. possession, he hit a fadeaway over his foil, Nikola Jokić, with 4:17 left, cutting Serbia’s lead to two.

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Finally, with Jokić dropping off him some, in the surest sign that he really was willing to do the dirtiest of work in the name of winning, Embiid set a crushing screen to free Curry, who rattled in a three-pointer — the ball seemed to jitterbug on the rim for 5 seconds before falling through — to put the U.S. up by 85-84, for the first time in the second half.

“I knew Jokić had four [fouls],” said Embiid, who checked out of the game for good 8.2 seconds before the buzzer. “So he was not going to step up, and I had a lot of space. And when you’re playing with the best shooter to ever play, just get him wide open, especially on a night like tonight.”

Yes, Curry was downright remarkable: 36 points, 12-for-19 from the field, 9-for-14 from three-point range, perhaps the best shooting performance in an international game this century. And still the U.S. had to have every bit of what Embiid gave. “We’ve got a lot of great talent on the team,” Embiid said. “Tonight, it was different. I was more needed to score the ball, attack, whatever it takes to win. We knew this was going to be a test. Playing against a team three times, you’re not going to always beat them by 20 or more.”

Forget beating Serbia by 20. For three quarters, it looked like Team USA was doomed to suffer the fate of the great favorites that couldn’t finish — the 1980 Soviet ice hockey team, the 1983 Houston Cougars, the 2007 New England Patriots. Serbia was that good, getting one open look after another and hitting shots even when the U.S.’s defense was sound.

“They played a perfect game,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr said. “Our coaches were saying, ‘Villanova-Georgetown.’”

A great comparison for a while. But the beauty of Team USA’s talent and depth — in a game that still has a 24-second shot clock — is that that talent and depth can overwhelm even an opponent that’s playing flawless basketball. Jokić arguably is the best player in the world right now, but Serbia is asking him to do so much, and Embiid was a little fresher, a little faster at the end Thursday.

“He’s our best option against Jokić because he can score and he can make him work at the other end,” Kerr said. “Joel’s work in that second half forced Jokić to have to guard, and maybe that tired him out a little bit for the stretch run.”

To a great extent, to so many of the Sixers’ fans and followers, Embiid is in a no-win situation here at the Olympics. If he performs as he did Thursday, well, he’s on a team full of Hall of Famers. He should be terrific. And if he has a poor game or two — the kind of games he was having during Team USA’s exhibition schedule and earlier in this tournament — well, he’s just showing his true colors.

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He has had to adjust here, to figure out when he can be the offensive force he always is for the Sixers and when he has to do other, subtler things to help his team win, and it was fair to doubt whether he would. The beauty of this semifinal game was that he did both — the big things and the small things.

He wasn’t perfect, not by any stretch — a few bad turnovers, a couple of rebounds there for the taking that he didn’t grab. But this was the kind of performance that the people who have watched Embiid for a long time were waiting to see from him in a game that meant everything. Without him, this Olympic team, USA Basketball, and pretty much all of America would have spent days, months, maybe years wondering what the hell happened at Bercy Arena that August night in Paris. Now there’s just the gold-medal game Saturday against France. Can he quell those same kinds of questions come next spring, once the Sixers are back in the playoffs? For the first time in a long time, Joel Embiid gave everyone reason to believe he can.