I met Kobe Bryant two months shy of his 18th birthday in Chicago in 1996, where he was attending the NBA pre-draft camp. He was all by himself on the mezzanine of the Marriott Hotel in the Loop, staring wistfully down into the lobby like a teenage boy a long way from home.

So I was wrong about Kobe from my very first impression.

He wasn’t overwhelmed in the least. Innocent as he looked, he was like a crown prince perusing a world he felt born to rule.

Given his up-front ambition to surpass Michael Jordan, a long line of people were wrong about Kobe — essentially everyone who ever heard of him aside from immediate family.

Perhaps half the little boys in the nation born after 1975, and a significant percentage in the world, set out to be like Mike, although few announced their intentions as Kobe did. None of them made it. Only Kobe came close.

The rest of those boys only had dreams. Kobe had a destiny.

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Well, he thought he did, anyway. He realized is at age 6, he would tell me years later.

Precocious as he was, everyone tried to let him down easy. In the Philadelphia summer league he grew up playing in between his father’s seasons in Italy, founder Sonny Hill made all the players attend instructional sessions, in which it was hammered into the heads of the players, all of whom dreamed of playing in the NBA, what a long shot it would be.

The kids were supposed to list realistic ambitions for when the dreams faded. Kobe wouldn’t. He was going to play in the NBA, period.

Teenagers had already begun coming straight to the NBA from high school. Kevin Garnett had done it the year before, but they were all young bigs.

Kobe was a shooting guard — “Grant Hill with a jump shot” according to his prep rep. The world wasn’t ready for 17-year-old, 6-foot-5, 165-pound NBA rookies.

“He’s kidding himself,” said NBA scouting director Marty Blake, an old league hand whose job was to tell the press nice things about prospects. “Sure, he’d like to come out. I’d like to be a movie star. He’s not ready.”

I was ideally suited to cover Kobe. I had covered his father, the happy-go-lucky former player known in Philadelphia as “Jellybean,” which was why Kobe’s middle name is Bean.

I was friendly with Kobe’s paternal grandfather, another happy-go-lucky guy everyone called “Big Joe” from summer league. I remember seeing Joe and Pam Cox, Kobe’s mom, before they got married, when they were just kids on a date in the Palestra.

I was one of the few press people Kobe let get close for his first eight seasons. Then I wrote something he didn’t like and got stony looks for eight years or so, although he was professional enough to take my questions in interview sessions.

He chilled in recent seasons. Now with the fans who scorned him around the NBA realizing how much they would miss him, Kobe, enchanted by the love, is like blood brothers with the few of us left from the beginning.

If no one dreamed it would end this way, it should. There were players almost as good as Kobe and a whole lot more fundamental, but no one put as much into the game as he did, training year-round in a way that not even demon workers like Magic Johnson had.

I’ve covered a lot of cool people, many of whom were a lot easier to deal with, who did a lot of cool things. Nothing matches my 20 years watching Kobe go from this quiet, young guy to an all-time NBA great.

Just like he said he would. That’s Kobe Bryant.

•••

This is Kobe at 21:

We’re in the bleachers at the practice site early in the 1999-2000 season. His struggle with Shaquille O’Neal has begun to emerge. New coach Phil Jackson isn’t having it. The ball will go into Shaq first, period.

“So,” I tell Kobe, ever helpful, “this shot where you dribble the ball up and then shoot it is no good.”

In person, if not in games, Kobe is well-mannered and soft-voiced, still pretty reserved.

“Why?” he says.

“Well, maybe next time down, you run a back door and Rick Fox sees you’re open and says, ‘Bleep you.’”

Kobe seems surprised that Fox would ever react like that.

Kobe was like that. I interviewed him a lot but quoted him rarely, which is the way he preferred it. He often played dumb to see if you had a point that you could explain.

For years when I thought back to this exchange, I thought Kobe knew exactly what I was saying and why. Now I’m not sure.

Kobe was so bulletproof, he may have thought it was OK for him, being Kobe, to take a 20-footer before anyone passed to anyone else, and that Fox belived it as much as he did.

Michael Jordan grew up trying unsuccessfully to beat two older brothers.

Kobe was raised a godling as the youngest child, and only boy, by loving parents and two older sisters.

Even after becoming the star of stars, Jordan mused privately about being pulled off his pedestal. I don’t think that ever came up for Kobe.

Kobe would have been a better player, and would have taken fewer awful shots, if he had some fear, but he had as little as God allows.

That’s what covering him was like, 20 years of marveling at him.

It’s the 1998 All-Star Game in New York. The youth of America has voted Kobe to the first team even though he doesn’t start for the Lakers.

NBC goes off its rocker, promoting it as a shootout between Kobe, 19, and Michael, 35, who’s about to become a six-time champion and five-time MVP.

Rising to the occasion — and waving the grownups out of his way until West teammate Karl Malone takes himself out — Kobe shoots nine of the first 11 times he touches the ball.

I mention it to Laker publicist Raymond Ridder, sitting next to me.

“That’s two less than he shot it in the rookie game last year,” says Raymond without missing a beat.

•••

Of course, perfect ambition means no one ever set himself up the way Kobe did.

At 23, he was a three-time NBA champion and a four-time All-Star.

At 24, he was on trial for sexual assault, a charge that would ulimately be dropped and settled.

At 25, he was on his own after the Lakers traded O’Neal to keep him, reducing themselves to also-rans, while players around the league sided with Shaq against Kobe.

At 27, Kobe lamented his existence in a first-person magazine article, wondering if he would ever win another title — and, for the first time, questioning the goals he had set for himself.

“Am I supposed to obsess myself with winning only to win, retire and wonder if all my sacrifices were worth it?” he wrote.

“Is it OK for me to sacrifice time away from my children, time watching them grow up, missing Easter, Christmas and other special moments, to win a ring?”

It was as if his soul has been burned to the consistency of charcoal. He was a total pain with the local press corps, which referred to him sardonically as “Ocho,” Spanish for eight, his original number eight.

One night he overheard a writer ask Lamar Odom a question.

“Oh,” said Kobe, assuming, of course, someone was trying to pull something over on Odom, “the old okey-doke, huh?”

Lots of people got The Glare. He stared referees down so intently, you thought he might melt one.

At 28, he hit bottom, demanding to be traded, calling owner Jerry Buss “a liar” and slamming GM Mitch Kupchak

At 29, he was the MVP as the Lakers acquired Pau Gasol and made the first of three Finals in a row.

At 31, he was a five-time champion.

So, it wasn’t a setup, after all. It was greatness his many critics would have to acknowledge.

•••

I saw Kobe the other night in the Laker dressing room before a game.

I was over in a corner, chatting with Baxter Holmes of ESPN. Kobe, who wasn’t playing, came out of the trainer’s room, heading in the other direction for the players’ lounge.

He turned, saw me, waved, then stopped and came over.

We chatted for a minute. I told him how happy I was to see him get all he was getting because no one deserved it more.

He said, “Thank you,” wearing this embarrassed smile that we never saw much of, or never saw, before this season.

That’s Kobe Bryant.

Thanks for the adventure of a lifetime, for all of us.

Mark Heisler has written an NBA column since 1991 and was honored with the Naismith Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award in 2006. His column is published Sundays in Los Angeles News Group print editions.