You’re a blowhard, and a know-it-all, and sort of a geek.

But you were our geeky blowhard know-it-all. And when you rolled into town not long after that awful Bronx night, a good-guy gunslinger pledging, at long last, to make us whole, promising to “make 55,000 people from New York shut up,” few could have predicted, despite the fact that you'd done it before, how emphatically you’d make good on your word — never mind the incredible circumstances under which you’d labor to do so.

One of the most bizarre phenomenons in the world of sports fandom is the way people approach players whose careers have been marred by frequent injuries. It's sort of like a hyena mentality: they lie in wait so they can pick at the carcass after the kill has already gone down, laughing all the while. (I'm just going to assume I've completely mischaracterized how hyenas operate; please, zoologists out there, don't bother e-mailing me as I am already acknowledging my mistake in advance).