LOS ANGELES -- LeBron James didn't lead the Los Angeles Lakers to a win Friday night in their first game since Kobe Bryant's death. And no matter. He did something bigger, and more lasting, and ultimately more important.
He offered all of us a path forward on a night that reminded us in beautiful and brutal detail not just what is lost but what we have to hold on to as we move forward.
"Now," LeBron said before the game, having wiped away tears, "I know at some point we will have a memorial for Kobe. But I look at this as a celebration tonight. This is a celebration of the 20 years of the blood, the sweat, the tears, the broken-down body, the getting up, the sitting down, the everything. The countless hours, the determination to be as great as he could be. Tonight, we celebrate the kid that came here at 18 years of age, retired at 38 and became probably the best dad we've seen over the past three years, man.
"Tonight is a celebration."
And it was. Something clicked in that arena, something that for the first time all week felt as close to right as we were going to get at this point. For me, personally, it struck me that the media seat I had was the same one I sat in for Kobe Bryant's last game as a Laker. And that, the last time I was at Staples Center, in November, I watched Kobe beam at his daughter, Gigi, and thought of my own daughter.
Again and again, the night -- not the game, per se, but this gathering of those dealing with Kobe Bryant's death -- became about his absence and the ways big and small he shaped this city and this sport.
There was every single Lakers starter introduced, again and again, as Kobe Bryant. There was Lakers coach Frank Vogel sending a message about family by making sure every Laker played before the first half was up. There were the thousands of Lakers jerseys -- Nos. 8 and 24, of course -- draped on every seat in Staples Center, a gift to a fan base suffering. There was the 24- and 8-second shot clock violations to begin the game, and Usher's rendition of "Amazing Grace," and two empty seats for Gigi and Kobe with their jerseys draped where they should still have been sitting, and LeBron's speech, and so, so much more.
One man cried in front of his son for the first time in his life. Others, later in the night, chanted Kobe's name over and over and helped fuel a late, if incomplete, Lakers fourth-quarter run. LeBron wiped away tears before the game began, then gave that pregame talk. Others turned to strangers and said, "This night, man, this is special."
LeBron honored Kobe with that impromptu moment.
"I decided for me personally I needed to let the words flow from my heart, and whatever comes out there's all truth to it," he said.
It was heart-wrenching, and it was beautiful.
"This week has been more about life than wins and losses," Vogel said afterward.
He's right, of course. There will be time enough ahead for wins, and there will be many of them. This Lakers season will be imbued with the meaning and the pressure of making it about Kobe Bryant. But there's time for that later. On this night, a Lakers loss did not, and should not, have mattered.
Yes, Kobe was a stone-cold winner, and a win would have been a marvelous way to remember him. But he was more than that, too, a point that resonated when he made it himself in the tribute video that ran pregame: That we like to put athletes in boxes and say what they can and can't be.
And the thing about Kobe that has resonated so deeply for so many goes beyond the basketball player that was lost. It's more about the basketball player who became so much more: The father, the competitor, the complicated human being who first won his legacy and then won over so many of his detractors, the consummate Los Angeleno, all of it.
And that kind of multifaceted, interesting man -- and the added grief that his daughter died with him, and that other families lost loved ones in that helicopter crash Sunday -- required more than a mere win in a basketball game. To honor a great man, maybe, you have to honor as many parts of him as you possibly can.
That happened Friday night.
It happened with LeBron's words. It happened with the tears that came pregame, from so many. It happened with Rob Pelinka, Lakers general manager and Kobe's close friend and former agent, watching the game with his own daughter, a nod to who Kobe was beyond the basketball player. It happened over and over again in so many ways that the final score wasn't what mattered at all. It happened with Portland guard Damian Lillard, also mourning the loss, dropping 48 points Mamba-style in Mamba's house.
LeBron said it best before the game even began: "So in the words of Kobe Bryant, 'Mamba out.' But in the words of us, 'Not forgotten.' Live on, brother."
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