Let me dispense with the obvious first. Michael Jordan is the best basketball player I have ever seen and “The Last Dance” was fascinating in its exploration of a particular kind of sports’ mania– the worship of athletic excellence combined with charisma. ESPN did not devote 10 hours to examining the career of Tim Duncan.
My response to “The Last Dance” took another tack. Someone like me who played the game at, at best, a profoundly mediocre level, does not watch Michael Jordan and dream of being him. I left being 12 about 56 years ago. Besides, I merely wanted to be Hal Greer.
“The Last Dance” reminded me why, even now, 15 years, 20 years after I last touched a ball, that I come back to the game and the purity of its parts, of its architecture. Unlike baseball, football and hockey, the other major American sports, you do not need a group to play. You can play basketball by yourself (soccer has this in common with bb). I loved playing with others, but I spent hundreds of hours more playing alone on empty courts in every kind of weather but driving rain storms and blizzards, but after the blizzard I often shoveled a ½ court just to be able to play.
The game instills love through its emphasis on jumping, on the grace of a well formed jump shot, on the feeling of flying when your legs are young, on the good pass with as clean a line as an arrow cutting air, on the pure animal joy of running.
Alone, the repetition is the pleasure, and the trance state that can be achieved moving inside the patterns basketball demands — the quick cutting, spins, switching of hands in dribbling and shooting, the strange joy in having the bouncing ball come back to your hand even though you are not looking at it, circling the basket from baseline to top of the key to baseline for shot after shot, the perfect symmetry of the hand releasing the ball and following through with fingers outstretched, the familiar rhythm of the muscles in doing all this for the 1000th time, the 10,000th time, the thrill of a hot streak, the silence but for the ball and your breathing.
Later, I found an equivalent pleasure in climbing and in walking with a heavy pack in deep wilderness. In all three the action becomes the purpose in the immediate present becomes the peace that is born of the action. Playing basketball could be a mystic’s pursuit. I could not have known this then, but in retrospect, transcendence is all about going beyond the body while in the body. That is a perfect description of the game when youth and its patterns mesh.
Watching those 20 and 30 year old clips of Jordan playing the game resurrected memories of this love affair. I remember flying once. My hand can still cup the ball as I once did and tense and go supple in the prospect of its release. 
This is where I played, the old West Lawn Elementary School, long since demolished. Look at the cut out space behind and to the left of the two wings. A tiny, broken-up macadam court was tucked into that space.
