"The thing to remember about those heady, giddy early days in New Jersey was how much of a secret Jason Kidd was. Those were the best nights. Kidd's talent was no mystery, of course: he had performed wonders for years in Phoenix, in his first stint as a Maverick, back in college at Cal-Berkeley.

But Nets fans — never what you would call a crowded room — were especially wary to embrace those 2001 Nets. They had been burned too many times before, by Stephon Marbury and Chris Morris, by "Whoop-de-damn-do" and the sad, slow destruction of Micheal Ray Richardson.

So in those early weeks with the Nets, Kidd performed his basketball wizardy in private. His first four games at the Meadowlands were played before friends and family: 8,749 against Indiana in his debut, 6,532 against the Hornets, 5,277 against the Sonics, 5,630 against the pre-LeBron Cavaliers. The Nets were winning, playing a brand of basketball that even the sainted '70 Knicks never approached. And yet were imitating the tree falling in the empty forest.

"I don't blame them for staying away," Kidd told me after one of those games, early in November. "There's been a lot of bad basketball here over the years. They want to make sure we aren't the same old Nets. I understand. It's our job to make people want to see us."

They did that. He did that. Night after night that first season with the Nets, he led by example and by performance, he cajoled and coaxed and coddled his teammates and Nets fans. He would slap triple doubles on the score sheet barely breaking a sweat. Knicks fans who already could sense the trouble brewing in their own backyard but who still appreciated good basketball joined Nets fans who barely could believe their good fortune."