The cycle of life, as well as basketball careers, comes in three stages. Youth. Maturity. And don’t he look good? My, my, didn’t Michael Jordan look good Sunday?
The old fellow should not still be doing these impossibly heroic things, of course, not by logic or necessity, not like he did in his youth when he scored his playoff high of 63 points against the Celtics.
“We didn’t win that game,” Jordan remembered.
Not like the 56 against Miami on the way to the second championship or the 55 against Phoenix during the three-peat, those years the primest of Jordan’s time.
Not even the night against the Knicks early in the comeback season, for that was to make a point, 55 of them, in fact.
Certainly not 55 against the Washington soon-to-be-Wizards, as soon as Wednesday, is my guess.
“He needed them all,” said Washington coach Bernie Bickerstaff, long on lip and short on math for a man whose team lost by five.
Had Jordan won the game at the buzzer, the deal is not so big. One shot, one moment. Even Toni Kukoc did that once.
Had Jordan involved the rest of his team as he should have (“I apologized,” he said), it is just another first-round playoff victory, and the Bulls’ resume is full of those.
No, this was special. Jordan made it special. For himself. For us. What this was is merely the marrow of the legend, the heart of the argument, evidence for the greatness of Jordan.
This is the man who can beat another team by himself.
“Michael is Michael,” said Washington’s Juwan Howard. “We all know that. I watched him do this for years as a kid growing up.”
And that is what it has come to, Jordan playing against a Chicago kid like Howard, and playing like he did when Howard was a kid.
“Michael is kind of like a big brother to me,” Howard said.
At least Howard did not say father.
Reminders of the inevitable are nine-point games in February, lost dribbles, staggers on defense and late-game weariness. These are the days Jordan should be stepping on the tongue that still hangs with all the insouciance it ever did.
These failures may yet come in these playoffs. If the Bulls need 50-point games from Jordan to beat ciphers, neither he nor the Bulls are going to get another championship.
Jordan should be beyond reconfirming himself, past dropping souvenirs of how he became what he is.
“Probably the greatest basketball player in the game today,” Bickerstaff said, offering the lamest compliment Jordan may ever receive.
Washington has contrived a brave strategy to beat the Bulls, insult implied.
“Our thing is to make Michael play great,” Chris Webber said. “To make him beat us.”
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You don’t tug on Superman’s cape . . .
When Jordan and the Bulls were as young as the Bullets are now, Chuck Daly of the Pistons concocted what he called the Jordan Rules. Jordan could not be allowed to beat his team. Someone else would have to do it and someone else could not for the longest time. Wise man, Daly.
Now an elder luminary, Jordan is handed a dare by upstarts. Bickerstaff gives one man, Calbert Cheaney, the job it used to take triple teams to do.
“He kept asking me, `Aren’t you tired yet?’ ” Jordan said. “I said, `Have we won yet? Then I ain’t tired.’ “
Maybe the simple truth is that Jordan will always be Jordan. Maybe the truth is that is what we wish were the truth.
“If he’s going to get it done,” Bickerstaff said, “he’s going to have to be great. And damned if he wasn’t.”
This was one for the scrapbook. There is still a little room.