LeBron James won’t last forever

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it started happening. It was between graduation and the New Year. Somewhere, a light flickered off, and new things stop moving me. I became felled over by an aching desire — no, a need — to revisit — no, revel — in the past.

All in an attempt to turn the familiar into a soothing mechanism, I re-watched old TV shows, re-read old books, listened to the music of my teenage years, rediscovered old gems. I couldn’t make the same kind of raw, untethered emotional connection I once shared with the things I loved and — struck by nostalgia — I tried desperately to cling to what remnants I could.

According to Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, musical nostalgia isn’t merely a manifestation of our emotional longing for the past. It’s a neurological phenomenon. Our synapses fire at a heightened rate when we’re confronted with music we listened to from the age of twelve up until about twenty-two, and “our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we’ll hear as adults.” I suspect this sensation isn’t reserved to the auditory cortex.

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LeBron James has been a professional basketball player for over half my life. He has dominated the prism through which I consume the sport: the giant, roving platonic ideal of efficiency, of dominance, with enough mythology in tow to captivate a gothic historian.

And man, he is doing a number on me.

I’ve found myself tearing up watching the final seconds of Game 7 of the NBA Finals, LeBron crumpling to the floor, teary-eyed in the face of deliverance, as many times as I have at the first utterings of his latest commercial sermon. “You’re not supposed to be here”, he says, and like clockwork, the full weight of all that he has achieved and all that he has overcome bowls me over.

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The commercial and the block itself — they evoke the same emotion. LeBron has so lived up to his mythology that the man himself is synonymous with the loaded representation. The advertisement is the truth and the truth is an advertisement.

He has reached that echelon, having solidified his place as the best player on the planet, and of his generation. But cheering for him is like watching someone clear the peak of Mt. Everest only to peer out and find the crest of a higher mountaintop obstructing the view. Jordan’s shadow forever looms. Defeating these Warriors in the NBA Finals, led not only by Stephen Curry but Kevin Durant, is the one tall task that just might get it done.

It is impossible to oversell how much LeBron means to me, how much it would mean to see this happen. Not only because he is one of my favourite players but, frankly, because I’m running out of relevant heroes.

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If you grew up watching basketball at a certain time, and harbor certain sensibilities about how the game should be played — if you pray to the altar of these ideas — if you grew up cheering for LeBron, then this is also likely to be true: you wanted few things more than to watch Mike D’Antoni’s seven-seconds-or-less Phoenix Suns wipe the floor with Greg Popovich’s San Antonio Spurs, the antithesis of Steve Nash’s run-and-gun, floor-spacing, ball-whipping Suns.

The Suns could never get over the hump. D’Antoni’s run with Phoenix ended in 2008. Nash hobbled off into the Los Angeles sunset. But in time, the ideas won. This is now a league built in D’Antoni’s image. Pace and 3-point shooting continue to skyrocket every year, with the Golden State Warriors at the head of the revolution. Draymond Green, all 6-foot-7 of him, might be the best center in the league. Head coach Steve Kerr was a member of the Suns’ front office in their heyday, and D’Antoni was among the people he dedicated their 2015 championship victory to. And for a while, that was victory enough.

But to find D’Antoni in the same spot, nearly a decade later, as the head coach of the Houston Rockets, with a chance to knock out the Spurs in the second round; to be waylaid by the old, in a moment where everything new felt devoid of purpose, only to see him falter yet again, man… it slashed open forgotten wounds.

It almost makes it worse that the Warriors — with a combination of talent and strategy so potent that they’re being tapped in best-team-of-all-time discussions — are primed to be the team that puts an end to LeBron’s epic playoff run.

The technological kicker to coming of age: The things you love either disappear into the ether, or they’re overtaken by better, more optimized versions of themselves. This was the summer Mike D’Antoni became obsolete.

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LeBron has rarely, if ever, looked better. He is, in his fourteenth year in the NBA, possibly in the midst of his best playoff performance. The durability has always been stupefying. The guy who, at any age, has always been able to channel the athleticism he possessed when the leather hit the hardwood in 2003. Nobody else could peak at the 50,000 minute mark.

But then he followed up a 11-point dud in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals with a lackluster first half in Game 4, and topped it off by missing an open dunk; more aberration than bad omen, maybe, but it is hard not to be spooked by a statistical rarity when it finally strikes the person it used to skip over. All of which is to say, as much as I am floored by the fact that he is still so dominant, plays like that serve as a reminder that one day, he won’t be.

To grow up is to perpetually mourn something. LeBron’s mystifying durability may delay the inevitable, but it is inevitable: everything you cherish will eventually find its end, and in desperation more often than in grace.

LeBron is, at this moment, like a supernova over the sky. He has never shone so bright. One day, his star will burst. And then what will I love?