Though there’s a big difference between memory and sentimentality, the two often end up blurred. While sentiment fixes itself on particulars—the place we’ll never see again, the song we could care less about today, the relationship gone by—memory is about echoes. These three pieces, all from the not-so-distant past, are a test.

Ralph Wiley’s Dune-inspired portrait of Tracy McGrady catches the doomed swingman at the height of his powers. It was April 2003, and Orlando was on the verge of knocking the Pistons out of the playoffs. They didn’t, despite T-Mac’s predictions, and the jokes began. In retrospect, Wiley’s piece seems borne out of a particular kind of Afro-futurist hysteria.

I can’t hear T-Mac’s name without feeling a twinge; descriptions of what the sinewy, high-scoring Magic star seemed to be when Wiley wrote this piece make me sad. Part-Scottie Pippen, part-Michael Jordan, McGrady was poised to challenge Kobe Bryant for some fictive, Wire-like crown of the flashy players (those years, in truth, belonged to Tim Duncan). In retrospect, Wiley’s ode, which I sometimes recall as having previewed the 2003-04 season, was premature. Yes, it’s T-Mac at his best suspended in amber, if you’re into that kind of thing. At the same time, it speaks to something bigger—less personal, but writing-wise, more lasting. Digging McGrady isn’t a prerequisite for picking up on what Wiley, one of those Page 2 masters who can never, ever be replaced, is trying to do here. This is McGrady coming into his own, and if WIley has jumped the gun and maybe gone off the deep end, well, at least he’s done so in a way that makes the reader understand why and how this reaction is possible. Want to know what justifies several-thousand words of Frank Herbert jargon about a player who hasn’t really accomplished anything yet? This piece reflects that question back on itself. Wiley reminds us that sometimes, this kind of celebratory writing just has to happen.

I’ve revisited the Wiley piece numerous times over the years, in part because I can’t believe it ever really happened. Charlie Pierce’s profile of Shareef Abdur-Raheem, on the other hand, was news to me. Taken from a 2001 issue of Esquire (dear magazines: get your digital houses in order!), it’s constructed around the dual axes of “cool,” a dying art in the NBA, and Black Islam. Shareef is most often referenced as one of the league’s perennial nice guys, and maybe its champion of post-9/11 Muslim outreach. Recent history has knocked him out of the “longest toil without a playoff appearance” conversation. Not even the NBA’s most ardent fans, have much interest in learning more about Shareef’s peak years with the Vancouver Grizzlies. Yet even if Reef himself no longer “matters” as an individual, the questions Pierce gets at have never really been explored in full. Cool died and with it, the profile of NBA charisma lurched free of discipline and restraint. Where does that leave a figure like Abdur-Raheem, who formerly would have inhabited the sport’s cultural cutting edge? Tellingly, the quiet, untroubled Reef may have been the last player to feel this bind. Pierce acknowledges this; one wonders if “The Rebirth of Cool” was meant to signify a stillbirth, or a reckless last call. Tradition suggests, though, that we haven’t seen the last of this discourse.

Note: This issue of Esquire came out on April Fool’s Day, so maybe Pierce thinks Abdur-Raheem is a huge square, and the joke’s on me.

The Renardo Sidney saga hasn’t exhausted itself yet, but we’re likely all sick of hearing about the prodigal son of amateur basketball. Jeremy Tyler stole some of Sidney’s thunder by choosing to leave high school and play in Israel, but it was Sidney—who more or less ignored high school, instead recognizing that AAU was the path to prosperity—who first broke the ground. Of course, as Tommy Craggs gets at in his 2008 Play piece on Sidney, this was a classic case of teenaged athlete bad faith. Sidney was an inconsistent, malformed brat, the ultimate creation of a grass roots system that, with the NBA age limit in place, builds up (and in most cases, ultimately tears down) promising athletes like never before. Sidney, almost humorously, has no choice but to attend college. But everything in his background has prepared him to be sucked up into the NBA, warts and all. As usual, Craggs spares no one, implicating Sidney, the AAU network, the NCAA, and the NBA for creating this monster. The big man’s stop-and-go time at Mississippi State has left his future in doubt. However, he remains the poster child for just how many things can go wrong when mixed, maybe insoluble, messages have become integral to basketball in America.