The dregs of October have been balmy and sweet and all weekend the black-top basketball courts of Chicago have been busy with young guys playing Hallowe'en hoops. The choreography of these games is intense, beautiful and sweeping. There are no time-outs, no shot-clocks, no whining. Just the pounding beat of the game punctuated by the odd holler of a guy who soars over the heads to dunk emphatically. "Lights out baby. Lights out!"
Basketball is a cultural constant in Chicago and in the spring, when the evenings stretch, the focus of the game moves to the outdoors and the jazz rhythms of the pick-up game drown out the ordered tootling of the NBA.
There is overlap of course. Many NBA millionaires keep in shape and keep in touch during the summer by joining street leagues and when they step out on to famous courts in New York or Chicago or LA, they come face to face with the reality of how lucky they have been.
Every city has its legion of guys who could have made it, talents who got hobbled by the academic requirements of scholarships, or bogged down in drugs or crime or both.
In New York they had Earl Manigault, who many people vow was the best player they ever saw. Bar none. In Chicago the legend hangs on a guy called Steve Space from the west side whose game was so complete that in the late '80s Nike featured him in two ads playing one on one basketball with Michael Jordan.
After a tough childhood, Space won a scholarship to the University of Seattle, but the college dropped its basketball programme before he got there and he was dumped back on to the Chicago courts.
This weekend the last sweetness of summer was being drained on the oblongs of blacktop which the city laid down in the parks and in the projects back in the '50s.
The basketball of the street, the Hallowe'en hoops, will be the last good stuff for a while. The NBA season begins in Chicago on Wednesday when the Bulls entertain the New York Knicks. Nothing but misery and humiliation is expected.
The city's joyous summer experiment with urban art ended yesterday when the Cows on Parade disappeared from the Chicago streets. Many people suspect that the most agile of the 400 decorated plexiglass cows which populated the streets for the summer have been drafted to the United Centre where they will masquerade as Bulls for the winter.
For a city that rejoiced for 10 years in the wonder of Michael Jordan, the coming season is a grim prospect. It is only a handful of years ago since Jordan was bounding back from his baseball experiment and scoring 55 points off the New York Knicks just to underline that he hadn't lost anything.
Three championships followed as basketball came to realise that the gap between the best guy in the game and everyone else in the game was bigger than it was in any other sport.
When Jordan left the Bulls fell apart. Coach Phil Jackson dallied with the thought of playing a high-profile part in the presidential campaign of his former New York Knicks room-mate Bill Bradley. Instead, after a year's sabbatical, he took a job managing the LA Lakers.
Scottie Pippen, Jordan's on-court lieutenant, left and Dennis Rodman drifted off, too, both of them just about existing in unhappy basketball after-lives where they just picked up the cheques for a while. Pippen's surly mouth got him traded from Houston after a season. Rodman's dissolute lifestyle sees him start the season as an unattached free agent, hoping that Jackson, the one coach who understood his uses, will bring him to LA.
BACK IN Chicago all is toil. The Bulls aren't expected to be quite so bad as they were last year during the strike-shortened regular season when they won just 13 of 50 games, but they'll still be awful if the evidence of their six disastrous pre-season games is anything to go by.
The starting line-up revolves around the surviving talent of Toni Kukoc and Elton Brand, the kid whom Chicago picked up in the draft having got first pick by virtue of coming dead last in the league last year.
The roster is filled out with such non-luminaries as Randy Brown, who hasn't made a successful three-point shot since the 1996-1997 series. And then there is Hersey Hawkins, a decent tradesman on his day whom the Bulls signed in close season after the worst of his 11 years in the NBA.
In the meantime, the Chicago Bulls, who dropped from first to last in the league quicker than any team in history, are hoping that another season of coming dead last will bring them two things; First pick again in next year's draft, and a wage structure which comes in well below the salary cap so that during the close season next summer they might attract one of the league's big boys when they become free agents.
Chicago, meanwhile, has instructed the Bulls to call back when they get a decent team together. Chicago is a little like Ireland in that during the good times for sport the place puffs itself up, happily loses all perspective, and chomps on a big cigar. And during the bad times it generally finds other things to amuse itself with.
And these are undeniably thin times. The Bears bumble along in the NFL. The baseball season was a penance. The ice hockey playing Blackhawks sold their best and most popular player to their deadly rivals from Detroit last year in a move seemingly designed to underline Chicago's impressive ordinariness. All the city teams appear to be run by the sort of businessmen who would struggle to keep a peanut stall up and running. People are digging in for a long famine.
And down on La Salle Street the last evidence of the sporting mortality of even the greatest will soon be seen. Unless Michael Jordan wins a pending court case, the people who run the highly successful restaurant which bears his name and holds a special room for him to eat in will give the place an overhaul and reopen it as Sammy Sosa's, taking the immense basketball down from the roof and replacing it with a baseball.
