By BOB KRAVITZ
The Indianapolis Star

INDIANAPOLIS - For a week now, I've been thinking about Michael Jordan's final appearance in Indianapolis on Tuesday night, contemplating his legacy, looking for something that moves beyond his simple status as the best ever and involves a greater sense of time and place.

And then I stopped thinking.

And saw Dirk Nowitzki facing off with Yao Ming. Saw Peja Stojakovic feed Vlade Divac in the low post. Saw Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker, an Argentine and a Frenchman, in San Antonio's electric backcourt.

And then it became so clear, it was almost embarrassing to think that it took more than five minutes of deep thought to find an answer: Jordan's true and everlasting legacy will be that he was the single most important reason why basketball has become a global game.

He is the primary reason why last year's all-rookie team was dominated by international players. He is the primary reason why the early part of last year's draft was overrun by foreign players. He is the primary reason the World Basketball Championship here turned into a celebration of the global hoops explosion. He is the primary reason why so many young people in Europe and Asia and South America eschew their country's traditional sports and embrace basketball.

This is not overstatement. I've talked to scores of international players, at the Euroleague Final Four last year, at the World Championship this past summer. I've asked them how they got interested in basketball while all their friends were playing soccer and handball and hockey. They all pointed to one man.

Michael.

Yes, there was the Dream Team in 1992. There was a concerted effort by the NBA to grow the game in the unlikeliest corners of the earth. There were the sneaker companies, and movie makers, and the Internet and all kinds of global technologies that made a very big world a whole lot smaller.

None of those matter, though, without a product that can be sold.

Michael Jordan was that product. He was the perfect cross-over, multi-level superstar, someone who was not just the very best his sport had ever known, but someone who was likable, personable, charismatic and smart.

It can be argued that when the history of the NBA is written, the two most important figures will be Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. They were the two men most responsible for lifting a once moribund league from the depths of the American consciousness. They were the ones who, in a large sense, saved the NBA from irrelevancy, turned on a country that had, to that point, been largely turned off. Magic and Larry made the game matter again here.

Jordan, though, was the third element of the hoops holy trinity. Michael made it matter all over the world.

When we went to Barcelona, Spain, in 1992, the NBA-conceived Dream Team was a curiosity, the Beatles in baggy shorts. The adoring multitudes didn't seem to truly know who these athletes were or what they represented; they only knew that they were Something Big, that they were celebrities in a world where celebrity alone has become a very powerful force.

When I returned to Barcelona two years later to cover an NFL preseason game, it was like the Dream Team never existed. Everywhere you looked, kids still played soccer. Every store you entered, the shelves were filled with Futbol Club Barcelona merchandise.

Ten years later, I returned to Europe, this time to Bologna, Italy, an ancient-working class city where locals still protest the existence of a McDonald's - aaach, American culture - and college students wear revolutionary T-shirts bearing the face of Che Guevara.

This was more than the self-proclaimed "Basket City" as it hosted the Euroleague Final Four. This was a city that revered basketball, that knew basketball. Soccer still ruled, naturally, but basketball was no longer a curiosity. It was a part of the culture, a part of the daily discourse.

Even as I traveled south to Florence, north to Treviso, I could see outdoor basketball courts dotting the landscape.

Michael.

Who, more than Michael?

That is it.

That is his everlasting legacy.