However, the gossip remains just that and the Jameses have yet to make any comment on it. Just looking at the story as pure folklore, though, it’s pretty fascinating — the betrayal by a man who is supposed to be, literally, on your side, the resulting emasculation and, hello, inability to perform. It’s almost Shakespearean. Then there is the element of female sexuality as both generative (she’s his mother!) and destructive (she ruined his game!). Add the age difference between James and her supposed lover — cougar alert! — and you’ve got pure tabloid gold. Unfortunately, it looks like this story won’t be going away any time soon.

Why, even the usually reticent Bob Feller spoke up, threatening to sit next to the Cavaliers bench in Detroit Pistons gear someday.

The world learned that James grew up rooting not only for the Yankees but also for the Chicago Bulls and the Dallas Cowboys, two more teams that were winning championships when LeBron was a kid. He’s a front-runner. Worse than that, he’s an extreme front-runner. When James decided to be a Yankees fan in the late ’90s, his hometown Indians were on a run of five straight playoff appearances including two pennants. They were great, just not quite as great as the Yankees.

So here’s Brady — you there in the back: Put your hand down please, we know what you’re going to say — wearing a Giants baseball cap to the biggest game in the history of the Boston universe, this month’s edition. The Giants are Brady’s hometown team, and they stink on ice.

As Brady watched the Celtics win, the Giants were a continent away, losing their fifth straight. They’re worse than everybody who isn’t the San Diego Padres, and they shouldn’t look back. And we’re not talking about a Bronx-style early-season stumble. They’re well on their way to a fourth straight losing season.

Support your local team, Brady’s cap might have been saying, directly to James, through thick and thin. Or through thin and thin, as the case may be, and has been quite a bit in Cleveland. This is a city that hasn’t fielded a major team-sport champion since 1964.

Brady’s cap points the way to a more satisfying life. There’s some momentary, empty pleasure to be had in jumping on a bandwagon, becoming a die-hard fan of some team on the brink of winning a championship. But it’s a lot more satisfying to root for a winner if you were there for the losing. You earn your ecstasy that way. You deserve it. It’s one of the great pleasures of sports fandom.

OK, you there in the back. Go ahead. Tell us about how Brady has been photographed for years wearing a Yankees hat. He probably just thought the black and orange complemented his outfit.

Confidential to T.B.: Sweet Members Only jacket, dude.

If Tom Brady, loyal supporter of his downtrodden boyhood team through thin and thin, didn’t exist, it would have been necessary to invent him. Consider it done.

What is it about Craig Kilborn that fills me with loathing?

Wait, that’s not the question. Here’s the question: Why does anyone who doesn’t own an NBA team think this is a good plan?

The idea behind the minimum age is that players turning pro out of high school or after only a year of college is somehow a bad thing.

From an NBA team owner’s perspective, it’s bad because these guys often have big-time talent that’s undeveloped. The odd Kobe Bryant or Kevin Garnett aside, 18-year-olds aren’t physically developed, emotionally mature or hoopatorially educated enough to excel in the pros. Even Kobe Bryant didn’t become Kobe Are You Freakin’ Kiddin’ Me Bryant till his third year, when he was 20. All he did when he was 19 was score 15 points a game while averaging 26 minutes, which by his current standards was just sort of OK.

Spencer Haywood, whose lawsuit against the NBA three decades ago won players the right to play in the league before their college class graduated, now agrees with the idea of an age limit, “but there are some guys, like LeBron James, who are ready,” he told Rocky Mountain News columnist Chris Tomasson. “I think there should be some sort of panel of experts who would decide what players under 20 should be allowed to play in the NBA.”

There already is a panel of experts who decide what players under 20 should be allowed to play in the NBA. They’re called general managers. Their findings are released to the public every year on draft day.

But their bosses don’t like paying teenagers guaranteed seven-figure first-round-pick money for a couple of years while they grow into their talent, often while sitting on the end of the bench. If the teams didn’t think paying an 18- or 19-year-old to sit on the bench and learn was a good investment, they wouldn’t draft them. They’d pick graduating seniors, who usually offer less talent than the phenoms but more polish, maturity and smarts, at least at first. Obviously the kids are a good investment. The owners would just rather someone else pick up the tab.

So hey, why not some university somewhere? The kid won’t get the same kind of basketball education in college that he’d get in the NBA — long before his rookie season ends, an NBA player has done more playing, practicing and learning than he’d do in two years of college ball — but on the other hand, the TV exposure he’ll get as a college star will make him a more marketable commodity once he hits the pros.

And here’s a bonus: The owners get to look like they support education. These kids need to go to college and get some book-learnin’, they get to say. Of course, most of these kids get no such thing. What they get is the chance to either play for free, enriching others, or become expert in the ways of cheating. As Peter Vecsey of the New York Post cracked:, “No, Siree, Bob; we wouldn’t want our kids to miss the value of the university experience.”

From the fan’s perspective, having young ‘uns in the NBA is supposedly bad because it dilutes the college game. Newspaper columns lamenting the disintegration of college basketball usually start like this: “Imagine the NCAA Tournament that might have been. Kwame Brown at Florida instead of underachieving for the Wizards. Tyson Chandler at Arizona instead of averaging nine points a game for the Bulls. Amare Stoudemire at North Carolina instead of” … uh, hang on a second.

But you get the picture.

Listen carefully: College basketball is just fine. The Tournament is just fine. The Final Four is just fine. Are you worried about the dilution of talent? Foreign-born players tend not to go to American colleges anyway, so take a guess how many American players in the NBA weren’t 20 when the season started. Give up?

Four.

That’s right. Four guys. If college basketball is noticeably damaged not to have Dajuan Wagner playing at Memphis, Jamal Sampson playing at Cal, and Amare Stoudemire and Eddy Curry playing wherever they might have gone, it’s past saving.

And even if college basketball has suffered a dilution of talent — and that dilution is caused by because of the loss of juniors and seniors, who would be unaffected by the new age limit — so what? You don’t watch college basketball for the level of play. If you want to see the best basketball players in the world, watch the NBA, now winding up its 82-game preseason schedule and engaged in answering such exciting questions as whether the lousy Milwaukee Bucks or the lousy Washington Wizards will make the playoffs and lose in the first round to Detroit.

What’s great about college basketball is the atmosphere, the intensity, the excitement. There’s a famous story about Magic Johnson’s first NBA game. The Lakers won a close one and the rookie was ecstatic. He hugged Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who looked at him like he was nuts and told him to relax, it was just one game. In college basketball, there’s almost no such thing as just one game. Pretty much every game means something to somebody. Watch the kids in the NCAA Tournament, even the early rounds. When they win they go bananas and when they lose they cry. When was the last time you saw an NBA player do either of those things? Why should he? It’s just a job.

Kwame Brown would be a hell of a college player, I’m sure, but what makes college basketball, and especially the Tournament, special doesn’t require his presence.

Enjoy the Final Four for what it is, the competition of a lifetime for four squads of kids who, even if they’re not the best possible squads in the best of all possible worlds, are still pretty sublime. Wade, Collison and Hinrich are all upperclassmen, so great players sometimes stay in school of their own accord, without the interference of a minimum-age rule whose real purpose has nothing to do with education or better basketball and everything to do with lining the pockets of NBA owners.

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I’ve already clinched defeat in every pool I’m in, whether those in it with me know they’re in it or not, but I thought I’d give you my Final Four predictions, just in case you don’t have enough to ridicule me about.

I had Texas beating Oklahoma in the semifinal, so I’ll take the Longhorns over Syracuse too. The key will be how much Ford will be able to break down the Orange zone defense with slashing drives. My prediction: a lot.

Now that Kentucky is eliminated, the wise guys who didn’t pick Texas, and even some who did, have jumped on the Kansas bandwagon, especially since it seems to be playing out as one of those meant-to-be scenarios for coach Roy Williams to finally get his national title with the Jayhawks, then take the vacant job at his alma mater, North Carolina.

I’m not buying it. Kansas has more talent, but I’m besotted with Dwyane Wade and his sharpshooting teammates, Travis Diener and Steve Novak. I think they have just enough, and Kansas is just vulnerable enough, for Marquette to pull off the upset. Then they’ll lose to Texas.

Instead, James has postponed immediate gratification and sought and won a decision from a judge that resulted in a two-game suspension rather than a “lifetime ban.” Some might be cynical about James’ motives, suggesting that the playoffs and likely the national championship for St. Vincent-St. Mary would be a terrific showcase for James’ talents. But let’s be realistic. Why does someone who’s a cinch to go No. 1 in the next NBA draft and sign multimillion-dollar endorsement deals before spring need to worry about having a larger showcase?

James is already the most celebrated schoolboy player in basketball history; is more publicity going to bring his shoe contract to, say, $105 million instead of just $100 mil? It appears that the kid has a sense of loyalty to his teammates and school, which is harder to find in sports these days than good taste in a beer commercial. Meanwhile, pay attention to James and the legal turmoil that’s surrounding him, because years from now he may be remembered as more than the greatest basketball player in the world. He may be remembered as the guy who fired the first shot in bringing down the greatest monolith in sports, the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

How and why? Let’s take this one step at a time. It wasn’t LeBron James’ high school that suspended him for accepting the retro jerseys. Coach Dru Joyce II was ecstatic about the judge’s decision and proclaimed that LeBron was “part of our family.” Of course it’s difficult to imagine any coach whose team was about to go into the playoffs who wouldn’t want LeBron James in the lineup. St. Vincent-St. Mary’s headmaster David Rathz was unhappy only because the court decision wasn’t a clear-cut victory for James. “It was like a tie,” he said. “I don’t like ties.” Rathz sounds to me like he has the makings of a great football coach. And I guarantee you that ESPN, which has already broadcast one of James’ games — it got a higher rating than the National Hockey League All-Star game — isn’t unhappy about the decision, either.

The only ones who are not happy are the board of directors of the OHSAA. The OHSAA is to Ohio high schools what the NCAA is to America’s colleges, that is, an organization whose primary function is to maintain the outward facade of amateurism that surrounds an enormous profit-making industry. Which is to say that in no way are high school or college sports “amateur” except in that they don’t pay the people who generate the revenue. High schools and colleges join organizations like the OHSAA and the NCAA to protect themselves from lawsuits and from the enormous cost of having to pay and compete for athletes’ services. But there’s a concealed risk. When an athlete like LeBron James understands that the rules are carefully constructed to exploit him — when he understands that everyone is making money but him — he can turn pro. He wins. His high school or his college loses.

In overturning the OHSAA’s ruling to ban James, Summit County Pleas Court Judge James R. Williams wrote that “competing for a state championship and, ultimately, a national title, are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities that can be completely lost” by one loss due to an absent star, or one game forfeited because of a regulatory ruling. What Judge Williams was saying is that LeBron James and all his teammates have worked long and hard for an opportunity to be champions and don’t deserve to lose it simply because some bureaucrat sitting in an office somewhere doesn’t approve of a high school basketball player getting a couple of free shirts.

I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as being so common-sensical that it shouldn’t have had to go to court to be affirmed. But there are company men like Steven Craig, lawyer for the OHSAA, who would argue otherwise. As Craig said in response to the ruling: “If the amateur rule is stricken or the athletic association is neutered in its ability to enforce amateurism, then I think pure wholesome amateur athletics take a turn for the worse.” People who think like Mr. Craig are either knaves, fools, or incredibly naive. “Pure, wholesome amateur athletics” do not involve broadcasting high school games on ESPN. Amateur athletics of the kind Craig represents are merely concerned with who will reap the pure, wholesome rewards of this so-called pristine amateurism.

In and of itself, Judge Williams’ ruling sets no legal precedent, but it is the first time that a court has ever intervened and established that a high school or college athlete has rights beyond those granted to him or her by the regulatory bodies that their school belongs to. It’s a crack in what has up to now been an impenetrable wall of power and influence that has kept thousands of high school and college kids churning out money that is divvied up by and distributed to self-appointed hierarchies that have somehow acquired the power of lawmaking bodies.

Today the OHSAA, tomorrow the NCAA.