MIAMI—Okay, so, Dwyane Wade and the anthem thing. You heard about the anthem thing? Before Game 3 of the first second-round NBA playoff series in 15 years to include Toronto, the girl with the 27-year-old voice started O Canada kind of out of nowhere, and the teams scrambled to line up, and Wade was in the middle of this routine he does. He makes a short shot, then a jumper. He has to make it. Well, he missed, and missed again, and missed again, and we were into the part about all thy sons command when Wade, finally, joined the line.

And now there is outrage! Outrage, I say! He should apologize! Wade was asked about it on Sunday, after the Toronto Raptors had won a crazy eventful Game 3, and said this:

“I’m not a disrespectful person,” he said. “So if anyone thinks I’m being disrespectful to a country then they have no idea who Dwyane Wade is.”

Apparently they started the anthem at a different part of the clock than usual, and Wade was a slave to his routine, though he never did make the shot. He said they will adjust their pre-game routine for Game 4, and the NBA declined to suspend him, because it’s not like he was making a political statement. It could have gone better, but it’s not the worst.

AND YET: Some people are very angry. A Toronto-based MPP wrote a stern letter to NBA commissioner Adam Silver about it, calling it an urgent matter and misspelling Wade’s first name. City councillor Norm Kelly, a human being disguised by a social media manager as a meme, tweeted that O Canada should be played all of Game 5.

(Sound of my forehead hitting my keyboard, over and over.)

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Look, I love the anthem. I love our country. But Toronto native Cory Joseph doesn’t know all the words to The Star-Spangled Banner, while we’re on the subject. National anthems before pro sporting events are kind of silly anyway. Just play Thunderstruck by AC/DC, or something like that, and off you go.

No, what Raptors fans should be worrying about is the actual Dwyane Wade. He is 34 now, and with both of the monster centres in this series sidelined by injury — Hassan Whiteside’s knee for the Heat, Jonas Valanciunas’ ankle for Toronto — this is now a guard series, and Wade is a Hall of Famer in waiting, still. In Game 3 he became his best self; 29 points after halftime, 38 for the game along with eight rebounds, four assists and one turnover, all on smarts and touch and confidence, brilliant. Wade is 34 and has been through the wars, and he can’t always be his younger self anymore. But for a half, he was.

“If you think you’re still that young guy, it’s hard (to get older),” said Wade in a long conversation Sunday. “But you have to understand that things change. Your body changes, the way you view and approach things changes, the game changes. Things change, so you have to be able to adapt. I would love to be 22, 23 years old, but I also love being 34 years old, because I’m so much wiser and smarter and I have a better life than I did at 22 or 23.

“So when it comes to basketball you have to adapt, you have to change. I’m not flying over the rim anymore like I used to. So I adapt my game, I change my game, and I work on my skill more than I work on coming in here and doing windmills, or trying to beat guys off the dribble. Now it’s about getting to my spots, reading the defender, and being smarter than him on this play.”

Wade is an NBA greybeard now, left in the shadow of Miami’s LeBron-Wade-Bosh-era titles. But he still thinks of himself as the ultimate underdog — the kid who was lightly recruited, went to Marquette, and walked out of Madison Square Garden after being taken No. 5 overall without being noticed.

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“I hit the streets of New York, nobody bothered me,” says Wade. “Like, the night before the draft I went out with my high school coach, and we went to a piano bar. A piano bar. Everyone was clubbing, partying, I was just walking the streets of New York with my high school coach, like, to reminisce about where we at, and we just stopped at a piano bar. Just chilled. We walked back. I think I had one guy run up to me to ask for an autograph. And the reason I remember is I had some fresh white Jordans, and a mark had dropped on my shoe. And I was so mad. I didn’t have no money at the time, so I was like, come on, bro! I always remembered that.”

His game has changed, now: he is not the kid who charged at Dallas over and over in the 2006 Finals. He got to the rim a few times against Toronto in Game 3, but it was mostly midrange stuff, plus a surprising run of three-pointers, which he is suddenly comfortable with. Wade has confidence and self-awareness, as megastars go.

“It changes everything,” says Wade. “But obviously in the Dallas series, people said a lot of things. But I put a lot of pressure on them. They wasn’t giving me fouls there; they were giving me fouls here. Well, the game has changed. First of all, I’m not getting up as high, and two, I’m not getting those same calls that I was getting. So now I have to adjust, to say, I’m not going all the way down there. Because at the end I’m not going to get up and go to the free-throw line, so I’ve got to adjust it. It changes how you have to play the game, so instead of playing the game 94 feet, I may have to play the game 90 feet. Every now and again if I can get around a big I will, but I’m not just throwing my body in there.”

Boo Wade in Game 4 and 5, Raptors fans. Sing our anthem, as we do. Don’t do anything stupid. But mostly, enjoy that the Raptors are two wins from the Conference final, and worry that Wade is Miami’s best hope for making this extraordinarily tight series a long one. Appreciate that he is still a basketball genius, and that he, more than anyone, is who Toronto will have to beat.