In a kinder, saner world the NBA All-Star Game would be in Charlotte this weekend and Hornets owner Michael Jordan could be basking in warm memories and generous applause, reminded of the way things used to be.
But politics and pretension persuaded the NBA to move the thing to New Orleans where going to the bathroom has less to do with your gender than with wherever you happen to be standing at the time.
Otherwise, nothing notable marks this NBA All-Star weekend except to observe that it closes out the silly season until next summer when the least trivial of such gatherings will take place in Miami, where objections are few and tickets remain.
A faint endorsement that, but the best of these things still remains the baseball affair. It is no more significant, but the actual game is played the way actual baseball games are played.
The NBA game, or the NHL game, or even the worst of the bunch, the NFL waltz and giggle, are awards shows without tuxedos, though you never know what someone might wear to the slam dunk contest.
Harmless? Sure, but useful enough to make political points when necessary and phony enough to wonder why bother at all.
The honor of being considered among the best in a sport should be valued and it is handy for the resume, but begging off seems at least as likely as showing up.
These all-star gatherings get more and more elaborate and less and less honest, becoming the alternative facts of sports.
They have to do with preening and posing and showing off, and not showing off for the fans or for the event, which would be somewhat forgivable, but for the most dreary of male motives, for each other.
All-Star games have come to encourage a kind of peacock flash and flaunt, or to use the official judging criteria, "artistic ability, imagination, body flow and fan response," reducing real games to figure skating.
The question of who has the hardest shot in hockey or who can dribble quickest around traffic cones seldom inspires a bar bet, never mind a bar fight.
Honestly, the more astonishing thing would be a 7-footer who could not dunk the basketball.
This is not to grumble about grown men doing what they would be benched for doing in a regular NBA game, or should be, but it is to point out that ego, the enemy of cooperation and teamwork, is not only allowed to distort things, it is rewarded for it.
The trouble with these "skills competitions", and all All-Star games have them, is that they admit that the sport itself is too dull to keep the attention of an audience.
While this may be true, there is money to be made. The emphasis gets all twisted, away from the game to the circus, where showing off against phantoms draws greater hoots and hollers than real competition.
Whether it is home run hitting or throwing a football for accuracy or slap shooting or bounce passing, these are basically drills turned into amusements, with paying sponsors like the purveyors of tacos and light beer.
This sort of scam always has been the business of figure skating and gymnastics, where prizes are awarded for doing the same thing over and over, the only judgment being whether it was done better this time than the last time it was seen.
The NFL Pro Bowl game has become so unwatched, and unwatchable, that sentiment is growing to do away with it all together, and the others always seem to be a letdown after so much hype.
With all of these exhibitions of football, hockey and basketball staged so near to each other, maybe one solution is to do them all at the same time, in the same place, have NBA players try to dribble on ice, or hockey players try to just jump, never mind slam dunk, in the bulky laundry they wear and football players try to hit a 3-pointer wearing skates.
It wouldn't be any more meaningless or absurd than it is now.
And I'm sure ESPN would create a network for it.
Bernie Lincicome is a special contributor to the Chicago Tribune.
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