Legacies

Tears, so many tears, spreading out and out in concentric circles Sunday afternoon. Spreading out and out across the country and around the world from that fogbound hillside north of Los Angeles, where the Sikorsky S-76 helicopter augured in at 184 mph and nine souls departed this earth in an eyeblink.

Tears in L.A., of course, where Kobe Bryant was an icon among icons in a city of icons.

Tears across the width and breadth of the NBA, where every team playing Sunday honored the Mamba by standing and letting the 24-second clock run dry on their first possessions -- 24 seconds, of course, for Kobe's No. 24, which hangs in the Staples Center rafters along with his No. 8, the two numbers he wore for the Lakers.

Tears in Bloomington, In., where Indiana gagged away a win over Maryland and Archie Miller's eyes were red for another reason entirely. Tears from Dwyane Wade and Doc Rivers and so many, many others.

Tears on a basketball floor in Corvallis, Ore., where the best player in women's college buckets, Oregon's Sabrina Ionescu, wept openly because like so many others she had lost a friend and a mentor.

Ionescu went on to lead No. 4 Oregon to a road win against No. 7 Oregon State, on any other day a cause for celebration because it was the first time Oregon had beaten its in-state rival at Corvallis since Ionescu arrived four years ago. But not on this day.

On this day, the day Kobe Bryant died, Sabrina Ionescu wept and dedicated the rest of her season to the Mamba. On this day, Oregon coach Kelly Graves explained that Bryant and his family had been close to Ionescu, that he and his basketball-playing daughter Gianna had been to see her play at USC last year and struck up a friendship, and that Kobe had communicated with her several times a week.

Gianna was on the helicopter with her father yesterday, and so she is gone now, too. Also John Altobelli, a legend in his own right as the baseball coach at Orange Coast College, and his wife and their daughter. Also four others.

So much loss. So much achievement and promise and bond of family erased like that, poof, in one freighted instant.

Today will be all about Kobe's impact on the game, on his 20 years with the Lakers and his standing as the fourth-leading scorer in NBA history -- LeBron James passed him for third on the list just 16 hours before Kobe died -- and as the man who holds almost every significant career mark the Lakers have. It will be about his impact on the current generation of players, on LeBron and Joel Embiid and Trae Young and everyone who tweeted yesterday that they grew up wanting to be Kobe Bryant.

That is how it should be.

And yet the image you keep coming back to is all those young women in Corvallis standing together at center court with their arms around each other, weeping. And of a father and his daughter heading off to the daughter's travel basketball game.

There is irony to this, fate or coincidence coming back around on a man and giving him exactly the path he needed. Because the thing that will not come up often today, the part of Kobe Bryant's resume we're not supposed to mention, is what happened in a hotel room in Colorado.

Where a young Kobe Bryant, once upon a time now 17 years gone, was accused of rape.

Where it went away because the alleged victim decided not to pursue the complaint.

Where Kobe Bryant, presumably, learned something, because no such allegations ever darkened his life again.

He went on and time went on and one day he woke up as the father of four daughters, and maybe that's a cosmic balancing of the scales and maybe it isn't. What I do know is being the father of four daughters surely must give a man certain sensibilities he might not otherwise have. Which is how Kobe Bryant wound up an icon not just to young men but to young women, too.

Tears, so many tears, spreading out and out in concentric circles.

Tears in L.A. Tears across the width and breadth of the NBA. Tears from grown men everywhere.

And from young women in Corvallis, Ore., too. Oh, yes.