Jacob, an old man, looks in a mirror and he sees Esau. He raises his wrists, grown paper thin, and sees the shimmering patina of faded goat hair. And, with a sound like thunder, the old angers and loves rattle through the sky like the teeth of a god, and in the flickering rushlight of age he finds they are both old friends…

Hate is a diminishing function of time. I can’t prove it mathematically, but I can prove it. Because I was born, as a basketball fan, in the early 2000s. And I hated Kobe Bryant. And I hated Tim Duncan. I even hated Kevin Garnett, too, though not as often and not for long.

Now, I don’t hate any of them. Time is the variable x, acting upon emotions, casting them at last in sepia tones.

This is not about Duncan, still limping along like the hyper-efficient cyborg he is, and neither is it about KG, burning out the last of his candle averaging 7 and 7 for a bottom-barrel Eastern Conference team. I’m here to talk about Dirk Nowitzki, my favorite player of all time, and Kobe, one of my least. And I think that’ll work just fine, because in many ways they embody the era, a mirror held up to a period of dominance we’re not likely to see again. Between Dirk, Kobe, Garnett, and Duncan, four men drafted between 1995 and 1998, we have 12 of the last 16 NBA champions, and 17 Finals appearances in 16 years. There is a “younger” generation, now growing old, that these four have largely denied a chance to see the light.

And now the trees are falling. Because as Kobe steps away from his third season in a row, you can feel the rumbling in the foundation switching from, “This house has a lot of character” to something a little more Scooby Doo. With it, I am confronting just how much I will miss Kobe Bryant in spite of himself, mostly because there’s a growing sense to me that everything is vanishing together.

***

In my memory, I hated Kobe because of the last decade, when he seemingly had everything and Dirk, nothing. Kobe was cast as an uncompromising champion, one who built and toppled an empire only to show that he was capable of reconstructing another one. The whole thing felt biblical, the basketball equivalent of Noah’s flood. The Mavericks’ leader, who never once played with a megawatt coach or superstar teammates on par with Bryant’s, supposedly lacked the spine to lead at all. Wasn’t tough enough, only played on one side of the court.

That’s what we read and that’s what we were told, if never what we saw when we watched. And, because of that, people like me were driven mad. It didn’t matter that Dirk very likely would have won in 2006 had it not been for the foul calls, just as it didn’t that Kobe lost more than half of his games over the next three years after Shaq got dealt, dominated the ball and may have tanked the deciding game of the ’07 Phoenix series. Kobe already had rings, hardware that covered his acumen as much as the skin on his fingers. Dirk didn’t and that exposed everything to bare bone.

Looking back on it now, it’s easy to imagine how different things could have been had the advance stats era just arrived a little sooner. Dirk may have had lower career scoring averages, fewer All-Star games—incidentally, was there ever a great player less well-suited to All-Star games?—and of course, fewer rings, but look at PER, offensive rating, Win Shares. Their careers aren’t nearly as far apart as it seems. Dirk even tops Kobe in many of those categories, if you’re keeping score.

In spite of that, I don’t have much of a problem with the idea that Kobe had a better career than Dirk; that’s not the point, really. What ate at me was the time they shared the stage as a conflated protagonist and antagonist, the American exceptionalist narrative crashing against the soft European, never mind how often they’d go out of their way to praise one another. That the narrative changed in 2011, when Dirk finally got his ring, only magnifies the original sin. It wasn’t as though he altered any significant facet of his game or played noticeably better that postseason; he hadn’t, and he didn’t. He was redeemed only through the results-driven, process-be-damned validation that’s propped up Kobe’s entire career. The longstanding invalidation that came before it also entailed the invalidation of me, too, and what I cherished about the sport.

And so I hated Kobe Bryant because I loved Dirk Nowitzki. But I also hated him because of his flaws, which are no different today than they were then, only shriller and more amplified. And, still, Kobe Bean Bryant is one of the best players to ever play the game. He was brilliant for an astonishing stretch of time. The whole era is hard to believe, in retrospect. We’re never going to see its like again.

Now, it is at last beginning to end, after 20 years, 19 years, 18 years. My era of basketball, one I will never be able to replace. It already has, in a lot of ways, for Kobe, who will probably come back to play for a meaningless team that will remain that way until the day he retires. As his last three seasons have demonstrated, it could be over any day now. The geniuses of the late 1990s draft classes are taking the scenery with them, the one who burned the hottest now burning out first.

***

In the end, I am finding in myself considerable fondness for Kobe, with all his jaw-jutting ferocity, with all his defiance and all his obvious intelligence. I am missing him as much for him as because when an immortal dies, immortality dies, too. I miss Kobe for what we will never see again, because when a redwood falls, the whole avenue of giants shivers. I look to my own German giant now, in fear and sadness. I find myself willing him one more game, one more season, or two more or three, with all of my heart, as much as I’ve ever wanted anything.

There comes a time at the end of things when our enemies are at last as harmless as our friends. When it becomes clear that what we have been doing all this time is squabbling over memory, erecting monuments and counter-monuments, ascribing and effacing. In the end, the enemy of all alike is not one other, but the fading of memory.

And when memory ultimately does fade, there remains only description. I can tell my children about Dirk. I can even show them videos, or whatever we’ll be using in those days. But they won’t know what it’s like to watch the Mavericks for a decade with one eye on the result and the other on Dirk’s box score to wonder if he was ever truly going to get the due he deserved. To live through 2006, and then 2011. When memory fades, meaning fades.

Of all these immortals, Kobe was the luckiest and Dirk the least fortunate on the basketball court. He never played with a Shaq or a David Robinson, and his Manus and Tony Parkers were here for a handful of seasons, not a decade. It’s been 11 years now since Steve Nash departed for more sun-scorched pastures. But now, all that strikes me as really important is that all this happened; that none of it, now, can be taken away. That it was something I loved deeply, and that it is now passing, and that Kobe is completely inextricable from it.

Near the very end of his life, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem called “the Circus Animal’s Desertion”, which now occupies the last page in his last book. It begins:

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last, being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show

I never knew how much I counted on all of these players being on show, winter and summer, how Duncan made Dirk and Dirk made Kobe and raised the triumphs to the ceiling and the failures through the floor. And I think now how unbelievably lucky we’ve all been that the whole carnival was always there. Many things, maybe nearly everything in basketball history, has passed faster than the era of these geniuses. Tracy McGrady was drafted the same year as Tim Duncan. Brandon Roy didn’t turn pro until 2006, and his career is already over.

The poem continues:

Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart

Where am I going as a basketball fan, as they begin to leave, as these lights I loved go dark? It’s hard to imagine that another era could ever be for me what this one was. I suppose that I know one thing, as the years go on, if they are lucky for us:

I will find myself often, again, where these ladders started, as old people do, revisiting the golden age. And one of its finest ornaments is gone on ahead, limping away at last.

Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated. But the twilight of the gods is everybody’s twilight.