James Phelan, a literary scholar at Ohio State, heard it on sports-talk radio on Tuesday, even if fans and hosts weren’t saying it outright. The nature of the discussion about LeBron James conveyed that no matter what happened next, after he led the Cavaliers to their first N.B.A. championship Sunday night, his legacy had been definitively chiseled.

There was “implicit recognition that narrative culmination has already occurred,” Phelan said. James’s career, as inadvertently reflected by the radio banter, was now the stuff of bildungsroman.

Right, sports fans? Bear with me.

The hero chafes at the comfort he knows, so he leaves home, believing adventure will give him both spiritual fulfillment and a livelihood. He gains knowledge but comes to realize something is missing. He stumbles back home, where he realizes the key to happiness was right under his nose all along.

Image James hugged his mother, Gloria, in 2003 after his high school team, St. Vincent-St. Mary, of Akron, Ohio, won a playoff game. Credit... Tony Dejak/Associated Press

It is the plot of the coming-of-age story, grist for dozens of classic 19th-century novels (and yet more middling 20th-century movies).