编者按：2015年11月30日，一则令人伤感的消息从大洋彼岸传来--科比·布莱恩特，这位NBA的篮球巨星将在本赛季结束之后，正式退役。科比·布莱恩特，在很多球迷的心中，早已不是一个篮球巨星的名字这么简单，在这个名字的背后，是整整一代人的热血和青春。

Deep down, we've known for a while that this was coming. It was impossible to watch Kobe Bryant at age 37, struggling to catch rim on shots he used to make routinely, and think that he would willingly sign himself up for more years of this. He's too conscious of his own legacy to do that. That this is going to be his final NBA season, which he made official on the Players' Tribune on Sunday night, isn't a shock to anyone.

Bryant has said in the past that he doesn't want a drawn-out farewell tour like the one Derek Jeter, his boss at the Players' Tribune, received in 2014. Jeter also played 20 seasons and won five titles for the most historically dominant franchise in the history of his sport, and by the end, he too was a shell of the all-time great player he was in his prime. The gifts and tributes Jeter received in every city he visited that year, the jokes about his age, it's all antithetical to who Bryant is and what he's about. He doesn't want to be out there if he isn't the best. He doesn't want to be a glorified mascot, paraded around the NBA for another five months before being put out to pasture, hoping once or twice to put on a performance that's something close to what he used to do nightly in his unmatched prime.

And yet, here we are.

For all intents and purposes, Kobe's NBA career ended on April 13, 2013, when he suffered the torn Achilles against the Warriors. It was the first of three consecutive season-ending injuries that made up a sad postscript to one of the most memorable careers in the history of sports. The five championships, the MVP award, the 81-point game, everything that will be on his Hall of Fame plaque happened before the injury. But the final three seasons of his career are essential to our understanding of who he is and what he represents. The defining characteristic of Bryant as a basketball player and a public figure was his stubbornness. He refused to believe that he would fall victim to the same inevitable aging process that has claimed every great athlete (except Tim Duncan). Over the last three years, over various mediums -- on Twitter, in his revealing Showtime documentary "Muse," and finally in his Sunday night retirement announcement -- we've seen him come to grips with his own mortality in real time.

For the bulk of his career, Bryant was whatever you wanted to make him. If you were one of his tens of millions of fans, you could point to the five rings, the clutch playoff performances and the unmatched intensity as a reason he's among the greatest players of all time. If you hated him, you could point to the advanced metrics that show he was actually not a great clutch performer. You could call him a chucker, and point out that his impossibly high standards alienated all but a small handful of the teammates he had in his 20-year career. You could be one of the egg avatars on Twitter that gets mad about his rapidly sinking placement in ESPN's annual #NBARank list, or you could point to him as the reason these exercises are pointless. Whatever your preferred narrative is, you can bend Kobe's career to fit it.

We have an eternity to have the debates about where Bryant ranks in the all-time NBA pantheon. Duncan may have had a better career, and LeBron James at his peak may have more of an all-around impact on a game. But there has not been a more fascinating player since Jordan, nor one who will spawn as many illuminating books and documentaries. There hasn't been an NBA without some version of Bryant in it in two decades, whether that version was the brash young high-school star, the unstoppable scoring machine, the analytics lightning-rod or the sad display that has been this season. Whatever form Kobe took, he was always there. Now, it's time to write the NBA's next chapter.