The 2014-15 season, his second to last, came as his body ran upon the shoals, with a blown knee, fractures and a torn Achilles’ tendon. He battled back with attitudinal fury. His coach, Byron Scott, predicted — foolishly — that Bryant would play all 82 games that year; Bryant didn’t disagree. (His body allowed him to play only 35.) He screamed at his teammate Jeremy Lin. He walked out of a practice, calling his teammates “soft like Charmin,” a critique larded with a splendid helping of obscenities.

And he shot, and shot again. He averaged just over 22 points a game that season even as his shooting percentage plummeted to 37 percent. On too many nights, his rage to dominate seemed to deprive him of his basketball senses. Even the greatest athletes find that mortality shoves, rather than tiptoes, into their room.

His redeeming grace, on display that January night, was that he was never less than cleareyed about what was happening to him. So when a reporter asked Bryant if he remembered what it was like as a young lion to face an old star like him, he shook his head. Know thyself.

“For me, it was always about chasing the wounded gazelle,” he said.

Talk turned to his opponent that night: LeBron James, then with the Cavaliers. As Bryant had spent much of his career chasing the legend of Michael Jordan, so James had spent years chasing Bryant’s crown. Respect in such rivalries was most often expressed with snarls and Darwinian thrusts, and never more so than with Bryant.

This night, however, Bryant sat back in his chair, his jawline soft, and talked of something like friendship with James. The men had exchanged hand slaps and a smile during the game.

“When we were competing for championships, it was a little different, a lot more moody,” Bryant said.

He shook his head, as if to make sense of a strange thought. “We seem to have become friends.”

On Saturday, the night before he boarded that helicopter, Bryant watched James hit a driving layup and pass him on the N.B.A.’s career scoring list. And Bryant, who in recent years seemed excited to discover that his retirement had given him a second life of possibility, wrote a tweet of genuine respect:

“Continuing to move the game forward,” he wrote, tagging James’s account. “Much respect my brother.”

It was the last public gesture Bryant would make in a life foreshortened.