Can LeBron James match Michael Jordan?

We watch sports, game after game, season after season, for the unexpected.

Most games — nine innings in the middle of June, a late four quarters because of a West Coast tip in January — are forgotten by time we’ve had the next morning’s coffee.

But we keep watching, keep coming back, hoping for the improbable, the amazing, the unbelievable.

So we can say we saw Kobe Bryant make 28(!) shots en route to an 81-point game.

We saw Tiger Woods win the U.S. Open in a sudden-death playoff, after an 18-hole playoff, on a balky left knee.

We saw the New York Giants, a two-touchdown underdog, vanquish the 18-0 New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

We saw the St. Louis Cardinals, twice one strike away from watching the Texas Rangers celebrate a championship on their home field, come back to win Game 6, and then Game 7 and the World Series.

Could we have envisioned these events playing out the way they did? Sure.

Would we have expected them? Not likely.

It’s why we, as sports fans, these past two NBA seasons, could not turn away when LeBron James stepped on the court. And even now that he has his (first) NBA championship, we still won’t be able to break our LeBron habit.

I, like other basketball fans, was annoyed and frustrated by LeBron’s decision to join Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, and the beach bodies in Miami two summers ago. But it wasn’t until last night, as LeBron danced in his Nikes in front of the Heat bench, as the clock hit zero on Kevin Durant and the Oklahoma City Thunder, and as the confetti rained from the ceiling, that it all made sense.

LeBron, in taking his talents to South Beach, was taking the fun out of the NBA.

We listened to his decision, and we tried to process LeBron, Wade, and Bosh, three All-Stars, three Olympians, still approaching the peak of their athletic powers, on the same team.

That was it. There went the drama of the NBA for the next five or six years.

LeBron was must-watch because he was on his own in Cleveland with the Cavaliers. The story was, “Can he carry a team and a city to its first championship in almost 50 years?”

LeBron took that story, one we didn’t know the ending to, away. Instead, we all knew how things would play out in South Florida. Regular NBA Finals appearances and rings were never in doubt.

So why watch? We watched for the chance that what was unexpected – LeBron’s plan foiled – might actually happen.

The Dallas Mavericks, emboldened by Mark Cuban’s brash attitude and armed with Dirk Nowitzki’s soft jumper, were America’s Team last June, spoiling Miami’s party plans and stealing the Heat’s anticipated title. The Mavs allowed NBA followers to collectively gloat and stick it to LeBron, “See! It’s not that easy!”

It was sports karma at it’s finest.

But this season, there was no stopping LeBron James. No stopping him from getting to the rim, no stopping him from finding the open man when he was double- and triple-teamed, no stopping him from playing some of the best two-way basketball the NBA has ever seen.

For the stat heads, he just came off two months of playoff basketball, playing 43 minutes per game, and putting up 30 points, 10 rebounds and six assists—every night. As you watched, you realized you were seeing LeBron James mature as a player and understand fully how to masterfully blend his unmatched athleticism with his uncanny feel for the game. His desire to win fueled what was simply a scary great run of basketball.

And as he accepted his Finals MVP trophy from Bill Russell, as he talked about the last two years, being humbled by it all, I was over rooting against LeBron James and the Heat. “The Decision” seems like a long time ago.

It’s time to enjoy LeBron’s true reign.

Now that we’ve watched them fall, and now rise, I want to see how high this Heat team can climb. Can they repeat? Can they win four or five titles? How many regular-season MVP and Finals MVP awards can the still-only-27-year-old LeBron collect?

Can he write a career resume on par with Michael Jordan?

This is why we’ll keep watching, because with LeBron James, we still don’t know what to expect.