LOS ANGELES -- Early June, morning. Zlatan has just finished wind-sprinting, vomiting and showering (in that order). The hurling -- it's standard. "I need to suffer today," he tells the LA Galaxy's physical trainer upon arriving at the team's facility. Which the trainer took to mean: again.

"I need to work," Zlatan explains. "When I suffer, I feel good." It's a theatrical and self-regarding thing to say. He clearly knows it, and knows that I know it, too. Which is why, being Zlatan, he then issues a pirate's grin and doubles down. "You just missed it! Five minutes ago, I could not breathe, I was throwing up so hard. You see? This is the way I work: very hard. I always say, 'Let's drag out the maximum from my body.'"

It's working -- and how. Thirty-seven years old, this guy! To behold Zlatan is to pose a series of rhetorical questions. Do you know how old that is for a professional athlete of any stripe? But especially for a soccer player and for a center forward at that? By all rights, Zlatan ought to be a past-tense figure by now, remembered for being the John McEnroe of soccer: touched, insolent, dazzling, infuriating, balletic, mouthy, inventive, clownish, immortal. He blew out his right knee playing for Manchester United in the spring of 2017, for crying out loud. Should have been game over, right?

But you know Zlatan. And you know what came next. If you don't on either count, first: You've been off planet. Second: The surname is Ibrahimovic; he's known in the soccer world as "Ibra" or, simply, Zlatan.

Also, a reminder: On March 29, 2018, Zlatan and his English bulldog flew from his home country of Sweden to California. On the 30th, after being introduced to his new LA Galaxy coaches and teammates and practicing for 20 minutes, he submitted to an examination by a team doctor, who strapped him to a machine, scanned the readout and told him what he already knew. "You're very tired. You shouldn't play tomorrow." On the 31st, in the first-ever El Trafico game against LAFC, Ibra sat on the bench while the home crowd chanted his name. Thunderously. Ceaselessly. Until coach Sigi Schmid couldn't take it anymore and, 26 minutes into the second half, sent his new No. 9 onto the pitch. Six minutes later, LAFC goalkeeper Tyler Miller cleared the ball about 70 meters, from the right side of his box. A Galaxy defender headed the ball back over the center circle in a slow, bloopy arc. It took one high bounce, then anoth... no, actually, it didn't.

Before we go any further, you need to know that what happened next was, is, uniquely Zlatan. Now, in statistical and analytical terms, he's probably the third-greatest player of this era after Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. All three are not only great finishers but great creators who elevate the play of their teammates. Messi's genius is low to the ground, squirrelly, a quick accretion of darts and scurries dictated by his bat-gene echolocation. Ronaldo's genius is all about aerial beauty -- that perfectly balanced matador's chassis of his -- and his dribbling and, once upon a time, blinding pace. Zlatan's is a pirate's genius, full of drunken daring and sword-through-the-Gordian-knot solutions. He possesses an inventiveness, a gleeful and childlike (haters would say childish) willingness to envision superheroic possibilities for himself that is unique in this era, and maybe in the history of the game. Goals that can be described as artful and transcendent, yes, but also as silly, preposterous, wacky, arrogant, jejune and just straight-up stupid.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic has had a me-against-the-world ethos since his days as a young punk in Sweden. No one could stop him then; no one can stop him now. Kevin Sousa/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

Know this, then, about that El Trafico ball that didn't take a second bounce because it can be said of countless goals Zlatan has scored since his professional debut with Malmo in 1999: Ninety-nine out of 100 wouldn't have dared it. Wouldn't even have thought it. They'd have let that ball settle, controlled it and looked for options. But Ibra took the ball at chest level and volleyed a 41-freaking-meter line drive over Miller's head and into the back of the net. Six minutes in. Virtually his first touch as a Major League Soccer player after being sidelined for nearly a year.

With that one touch, along with a stoppage-time header that helped the Galaxy overcome a 3-0 deficit to win 4-3, Ibra instantly became what he remains today, on the eve of another El Trafico: one of the greatest players in MLS history. And to be clear, we're not talking "greatest" in the Pele-NASL sense -- as in a football deity who was great a long, long time ago on a pitch far, far away in Europe or South America, then came to America to capitalize on his name recognition. Zlatan's is a present-tense "greatest."

"From the moment he arrived, his goal ratio has been ridiculous, nearly one-a-game. And these volleys and bicycles where this 6-foot-5 giant is flipping himself all over the place with the power and control of a 5-foot-5 gymnast? At the age of 37!" says the Galaxy's technical director, Jovan Kirovski, who played professionally in Europe for more than a decade. "It's getting to a place where I'm saying, and I know the coaches are saying, 'Stay high and score goals -- don't worry about chasing!' But he keeps delivering."

"I don't come here because of what I did before," Zlatan says. "I come here to demonstrate who I am. I come here to provide."

Provide? An interesting word choice. Not wrong, but not exactly right, either. The first time he uses it, I chalk up its use to the fact that Zlatan's English is very good but not great -- not yet attuned to idiom. But as he continues, not only to use it but to stress it, it becomes clear that he's fully aware of all the extra-soccer connotations the word carries. In fact, that's his point: He wants you to know that he's come to Los Angeles not to score goals, but to give and provide them.

"I believe I see things before it happens," he says.

"There are many things about you that don't make sense," I reply, nonresponsively, thinking of how odd it is for a muscle-bound guy to have some of the finest needle-threading foot skills the world has seen.

"Like the goal against England," he continues.

"I was going to ask you about that next!"

"You see? I know the future. Now tell me: How many would do that?" He answers before I can: "Only a crazy man!"

People will forever argue about which goal is the greatest ever scored. But the greatest volley goal -- this is it, right?

Zlatan's first goal for the Galaxy was a 41-meter wonder strike that 99 out of 100 players wouldn't think to try, let alone dare to attempt. Shaun Clark/Getty Images

November of 2012, playing for the Swedish national squad in a friendly against England, Ibra departed this Earth, scoring one goal, then a second, then a third. And then there was the fourth. England goalkeeper Joe Hart ventured outside his box to clear a long ball with his head. Before he could, though, Ibra, who was chasing, did something spooky. He ... stopped. Because like all transcendent athletes, he'd seen several seconds into the future. His third eye had solved the chaos math in real time. He knew, not only that Hart would head the ball but precisely where. Which is how Zlatan wound up leaping into the air and bicycling a shot without ever eyeing the goal; without letting the ball bounce; and with his back parallel to and at least 4 feet off the ground -- into the goal from 35 meters out. It cleared the crossbar by 1 foot, about two-tenths of a second before a sliding defender could block it.

Perhaps the daftest thing about this goal was that it was not a reflex. Ibra had a lot of time -- full seconds! -- to think it over. The moment is now 7 years old, but Zlatan recalls it in the present tense: "I know he will head the ball. That's the only chance he has. If he lets the ball go down, I will steal it from him. I have two opportunities. Either I go against him and take away, or I wait for where the ball comes. So when he jumps up, I back off. I know where he will try to put it is behind me ... "

To think: Yes, this is in my arsenal, fire away. ... The delusion, the punk-ass hubris of that! This goal, which even England's captain, Steven Gerrard, called "the best I've ever seen," remains the ultimate example of Zlatan's not playing by the rules. Not in the sense that he's cheating or playing dirty, but that he's defying the rules of physics, geometry, human physiology, common sense and good taste -- and constantly getting away with it.

Zlatan says he needs to be angry to be at his best -- 'that's the way I feel my life' -- something RSL's Nedum Onuoha learned firsthand. Katharine Lotze/Getty Images

Even so, when Ibra talks of providing, he's talking about something larger and less manifest than "mere" goals.

"[I] Don't come to MLS because I am 'Ibrahimovic,'" Ibrahimovic says. "I come because I want to show you what football is. I come because I want to show U.S. what my game is about."

Grandiose? Given! But Zlatan put his money where his mouth is. "I said to Galaxy, we sign this deal now. If you not happy in one month, we can cancel, and I go." This would seem tall if there weren't a precedent. When he was no longer able to provide after blowing out his knee, Ibrahimovic offered to reimburse Manchester United for the games he missed.

Eventually, it dawns on me that what Zlatan wishes to provide is nothing less than "Zlatan" -- in quotes, fully meta -- and everything that entails. Not just his beautiful game but also his unbeautiful game: his long history of cards and bans for unleashing his ire, fists and feet on opponents and teammates. Only when fans see the whole Zlatan package, the lovely and the ugly, can they comprehend the passion and anger he feels for the game.

The weeks preceding our early June interview had been pure Zlatan. In May, the ugly: He served a two-game suspension for grabbing NYCFC goalkeeper Sean Johnson by the neck. ("Ah! That clown fall down fainting and almost died, and I said, 'Let's call the ambulance because you are dying!' Then he send a picture to MLS showing a scratch on his neck! Listen, I've played 800 games. I've played against animals that almost broke my legs. But what happens in the game stays in the game. In Europe, if he send a picture of a scratch on his neck? They eat him alive.")