Kobe Bryant, of the L.A. Lakers, goes up against Arron Afflalo, of the New York Knicks, on March 13th, in one of Bryant’s last games before retirement. Photograph by Victor Decolongon / Getty

I was in Los Angeles trying to make up for lost time. On a March evening, I hung around the back area of the Staples Center, where the walls are covered floor-to-ceiling with a cherry-colored wood composite, way past the wide, purple-painted cinder-block hallways with purple-uniformed event staff flitting in and out of side doors. The game, against the New York Knicks, had ended twenty minutes before. For the fifty-third time this season, the Lakers had lost. They’ve won only fourteen games. The weather, as usual, was fine. There was a lightness, a buoyancy, that felt strange for a team this bad. Maybe sixteen championship seasons does that. Or perhaps it’s because the players and fans and team employees all know that the team is on sabbatical. Kobe Bryant is retiring, and this season is dedicated to giving him a stage from which the world of basketball can say goodbye.

Outside the visitors’ locker room, there was some small talk going on among members of the media as they waited for the Knicks’ interim coach, Kurt Rambis, to step out for his post-game press conference. Suddenly, Phil Jackson, who won championships with New York as a player, and with Los Angeles as a coach, and is now the president of the Knicks, appeared over my right shoulder. I had spoken to him that morning, and he had told me he was concerned about that night’s game. The Lakers, for all their woes, have talented young guards who on a good day can give any team trouble. They beat the Golden State Warriors, not only the best team in the league but one of the best teams ever, just the week before, by riding their guard play. And containing guards has been a constant problem for the Knicks this season. With the game over, Jackson seemed relieved, if not exactly satisfied. “Basketball went back a few years with that one, huh,” he said, a wry smile brightening his face. “That was tough to watch.”

He was right. The Knicks had defeated the Lakers 90–87 on a last-second three-point shot by José Calderón on a broken sideline play that careered toward disaster a couple of times before being rescued by Calderón’s heroics. It was a microcosm of the entire game. The Lakers scored just eleven points in the first quarter, and trailed by as many as sixteen. Nevertheless, Lakers fans roared every time Bryant touched the ball and begged for him to shoot each time he crouched into triple-threat position. An air of disappointment would descend anytime he passed the ball. (In their next game, Bryant didn’t play, and, when the Lakers fell behind, “We want Kobe” chants alternated with vociferous booing.) For all of that, there were only a couple of minutes left in the first half by the time he sank his first shot from the field. Then he came right back down and hit another. I have rarely heard an arena cheer louder. Later, the Lakers made their fourth-quarter comeback with players whose names are about as familiar as those of mid-nineteenth-century Vice-Presidents: Marcelinho Huertas, Ryan Kelly, Larry Nance, Jr., Lou Williams, Brandon Bass. Sitting close to the court, I was amazed at how free and unburdened they seemed. I asked ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne, who follows the Lakers closely, about this. “Kobe’s farewell tour has been a shield for everyone and everything else going on with the organization,” she said.

Bryant sat for most of the fourth quarter, a towel over his lap and his chin in his hand. When the game was close again, with about five minutes left, he rose from his seat and stood by the scorer’s table, to reënter the fray. The hero would have his dramatic entrance. He was finally allowed in with three minutes and thirty-four seconds left; by then, the Lakers had a three-point lead. Bryant hit one of his patented turnaround jumpers to stretch the lead to five points. The crowd let out its loudest roar yet. Carmelo Anthony, one of Bryant’s closer friends in the league, answered with a difficult three. Bryant hit another turnaround jumper with a minute and a half to go, and Anthony answered again with a perfectly executed rock-a-bye dribble-jab-step-crossover pull-up jumper. The game had gotten interesting.

It was tied, at eighty-seven points, with 13.6 seconds to go, when Bryant received the ball at the right elbow of the three-point line and drove down toward the baseline. His old physical explosiveness long since gone, Bryant was never going to make it to the hoop. Both he and his defender, Arron Afflalo—an L.A. native and U.C.L.A. alum who patterned much of his game on Bryant’s—knew this. The only question was when, exactly, Bryant would stop and rise up for the jumper. The crowd wanted it. Screamed for it. (Earlier, someone in the crowd behind me had yelled at a Lakers player for missing the split-second chance he had to pass the ball to Bryant, who had flashed open momentarily at the three-point line.) He pulled up. Afflalo stopped with him, but a fraction of a second late. The shot cupped the rim and then rolled out. The crowd let out a groan. As Bryant made the long diagonal walk back to his bench, the game still tied, now with 9.3 seconds to go, I thought about how the automatic response of support from a teammate, or a privileged fan close enough to have his ear, would be “Next time.” But that doesn’t really apply here. Bryant has firmly entered the nostalgic phase of his career. Fans hope for another time only to be reminded of what they had and what they’re losing.

Bryant announced that this N.B.A. season would be his last back in November, with a poem. “Dear Basketball” was mocked by some, but it has more going on in it, from a literary perspective, than may be immediately clear. Not only is the narrative circular, with a changed perspective at the end, it’s also both an epistle and an apostrophe—a form of rhetoric in which the speaker addresses an inanimate object as though it’s a living thing. As both a basketball player and a personality, Bryant has always put extraordinary emphasis on the importance of craft. He has also always owed a debt to Michael Jordan, and this was the case here as well: Jordan, too, published an open letter to basketball in order to say goodbye to the game. But his was in prose.

By the time Bryant published his poem, the Lakers had already played the Knicks in Madison Square Garden, and it was their only visit of the year. Theoretically, there were always the playoffs, but both teams are bouncing back, slowly, from the worst seasons in their franchises’ respective histories. On that Sunday afternoon in New York, people knew that Bryant could be playing his final game in the Garden, but nothing was certain. Some effusive hugs happened on court between Bryant and other players; a spontaneous tribute here and there popped from the crowd. But, for the most part, it was simply a game of basketball. Bryant, who missed most of the prior two seasons because of serious injuries, had been shooting the ball at a nightmarish rate—if you only had his numbers to go by, you would have been excused for thinking he’d spent the month shooting left-handed. He can’t inflict his will on a basketball court the way he used to. But he can still inflict his will on the state of the game: in the final moments of his long career, Bryant has taken advantage of his unassailable elder-statesman status around the league to master and unleash an economical churlishness that comes off as endearing at best and merely earnest at worst.