Sidney Crosby won his third Stanley Cup last night and was awarded the Conn Smyth Trophy, for playoff MVP, for the second year in a row. He wasn’t always Pittsburgh’s best player through these playoffs but showed up, as he often does, in big moments.

Crosby, who has led Canada to two Olympic gold medals, also led his country to a World Cup championship in September.

He doesn’t turn 30 until August.

Crosby has, somehow, lived up to all the hopes and hype shoveled onto him when he entered the NHL. He is often not a likable player. He has become hockey’s most recognizable name, though he is hardly an American megastar in the way Wayne Gretzky was. He is, frankly, sort of boring except for how petty he can be on the ice at times.

But he is also relentlessly brilliant and one of the top five hockey players to ever play the game.

We’re never going to appreciate him enough, though. Or LeBron James. We rush to anoint Tom Brady because he’s great and was an afterthought of a draft pick. We love Steph Curry because he was never supposed to do this.

And I’m not going to tell you that this is unfair. It’s logical: James and Crosby were so extremely gifted at a young age that we expected nothing less than greatness. They’ve delivered. Great.

It is, in fact, more exciting when a player upends expectations and becomes something he was never supposed to be. Sports, like any drama, works best when the ending isn’t easy to predict.

But there’s a tremendous burden in being a chosen one. We’re seeing now how heavily it weighed on Tiger Woods. And Michael Phelps — who improbably exceeded expectations — did not get there without public struggles.

Crosby’s lone fault is that he is annoying in a game where being annoying is seen as a virtue. He should not have shoved P.K. Subban’s head into the ice repeatedly. It was cheap and dirty. But Crosby has been a target for abuse since he was eight years old, and, as dopey Mike Milbury showed, the culture of the sport puts weight into plays like that. Crosby often complains to officials about missed calls, but again, that makes some sense: more penalties are committed against him because he is so much better than the people he is playing against.

Beyond all that Crosby has been unscathed. And LeBron bulled through the NBA in his early years focused on proving his place among its greats. More recently he has used his platform to go beyond basketball, and we are all better for it.

If you’re looking for a way to mitigate their success, you might point out how thoroughly Crosby has benefitted from having another No. 1 center, Evgeni Malkin, on his team. Or that James had to leave Cleveland and form a super team to get his first title. These aren’t completely invalid points. It’s worth talking about, if nothing else, because there’s so much airtime and internet void to be filled talking about sports now.

We shouldn’t ignore how lucky we are to see this play out, though. Crosby and James are extremely gifted, but many fleet skaters with vision have failed where Crosby hasn’t, and James is not alone in being tall and physically impressive. We’re watching two men deliver on their promise. That, we know after watching too many draft picks go wrong, is actually the more unusual ending.