A Merrier May

Bringing it all back home . . . home?

It's almost 12 years since Kobe Bryant became a Laker and he's been ours all that time.

Ours to dazzle, ours to try with his youthful exuberance, ours to horrify as we watched his fall, ours to shock as he threw the Lakers' organization under the bus.

Mostly he was ours to amaze as he lurched from crises of his own invention to triumphs no one could have imagined months before.

Of course, being Bryant, it would be on to the next crisis, which even he looked like he couldn't get out of this time. . . .

Like this piece de resistance, going from last May's days of rage to this Wednesday in May when Commissioner David Stern or one of his lieutenants will hand him his first MVP trophy.

How many of the fans who'll be chanting "MVP!" booed Bryant on opening night last fall?

However many there were, they will have been entitled in both cases.

Given Bryant's greatness and dedication, this starry night is the way it should have been all along . . . and the way it still could be.

He was just emerging from Shaquille O'Neal's shadow when Shaq was traded. Bryant got the blame, although it was entirely mutual with each ready to leave the other.

As Bryant later acknowledged, he thought he was going, too, to the Clippers. For years it looked as if he should have and saved himself a world of grief.

In the depths of the Lean Years from 2004 to 2007, Bryant discovered something new: fear.

Once serenely confident of achieving his goals, he felt abandoned and reviled -- "an outcast my entire life," he wrote for Dime Magazine -- "[always] made to feel like there was something wrong with wanting to win so badly and wanting to become the best at what you do."

Happily for Bryant, laying siege to the Lakers' organization from last May to October didn't get him traded to Chicago, which might have cast him into mediocrity forever.

Now his career lays out perfectly, on a rising power that should only be better when Andrew Bynum returns, with everything -- multiple MVPs, multiple titles -- possible.

For all Bryant's mistakes and all his luck, this isn't anything anyone gave him.

Only a few players were ever as gifted and not even Michael Jordan matched Bryant's 24/7/365 commitment. The hardest off-season workout Jordan ever put in would be Bryant's average.