The Helicopter, the Fog, and the End of Invincibility

On January 26, 2020, a helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, and seven others crashed into a hillside in Calabasas, California, in dense fog. The news broke on Twitter before the major networks could confirm it, and for about forty-five minutes the entire internet existed in a collective state of "please let this be wrong." It was not wrong. The man who had defined a generation of basketball — who had somehow become a post-retirement renaissance figure winning Oscars and coaching youth basketball — was gone at 41. Strangers cried outside Staples Center. People who hadn't watched basketball in years felt something they couldn't articulate. The phrase "life is short" trended, which felt both true and unbearably insufficient. Nobody knew it yet, but this was the opening chapter of the worst year in modern memory. The fog that morning was a metaphor that wrote itself, and nobody wanted it.