Like a lot of people writing Instagram and Facebook posts this week, we choke up as we type this. This is the saddest time in sports that we can remember since the loss of Walter Payton, another legend gone way too soon whose love of The Game and the people around him seemed to eclipse his talent, which was, in a word that we hope will enter the lexicon if it hasn’t already, unduplicatable. Sports figures and celebrities unfortunately pass away at just about the same rate as us mortal humans, and rarely is it a time when we aren’t saddened personally, since, though we didn’t know these people at all other than on a screen or in our radio, they’re nonetheless a part of our lives, and with their deaths, a part of us dies with them. If you don’t believe us, just Ask Voldemort if having a part of you die doesn’t suck.

So, in order to keep from more of the (continued) blubbering that we’ve been doing over the past few days, we wanted to focus on one of the many, although often overlooked, aspects of Kobe that made us love him and added to his mystique. It wasn’t just that he was a preternaturally talented basketball player; we’ve had those before, even though you can count on one hand how many in the league’s history are in the same class. The man also spent time living in Italy, as we did, and spoke fluent in Italian. We’d be lying if we said this didn’t make us love him more and feel connected to him in some small way.

Unlike us, Kobe was, as most people know, drafted straight out of high school in Pennsylvania into the NBA. He of course was not the first (or last,) NBA player that this has happened to, but with so many promising players that have come into the league with so much hype and promise, just to become a complete bust, it makes us cheer even harder when we see one who goes all the way and succeeds in the way Bryant did, and what’s more impressive, to do it with just one franchise, and an iconic one at that.