Last night in New York, Michael Jordan gave his blessing. The return of basketball's greatest ever player in Madison Square Garden seemed a pre-ordained event.

There seemed a certain irony that fate - and perhaps some shrewd NBA scheduling - should place the most steadfastly apolitical of American icons at the heart of one of the most patriotically-charged nights in US sporting history.

They call the Madison Square Garden crowd the aristocrats of hoops. Hence, they booed Washington's Christian Laettner solely because he played college ball for the hated Duke University as wildly as they hailed hometown hero Mark Jackson, point guard for the Knicks.

And for Jordan, they gave an ovation that stretched back to all his previous coronations at the fabled Midtown arena - the 50 points he hit on opening night way back in 1986, the 55 points he piled on the Knicks on his second-coming back in 1995.

Last night's emotion - the message from President Bush, Harry Connick Junior singing God Bless America, the presence of so many of the relatives of those bereaved in the September 11th atrocity - must have been a strange experience, even for the man who has done it all before.

Prior to September 11th, debate raged across America's sports pages as to whether Jordan should come back, about if he could do it again, about how he would look in a Washington Wizards uniform. Last night, New York and the world tuned in to find out.

The frame was a little thicker maybe and the beautiful one heard the jeers when he threw up an early air ball.

But the presence was still in evidence; the poise, the anticipation, the matador stance, the princely stride, the trademark tongue: the elements that made global the phrase: "Be Like Mike".

Maybe this unexpected and slightly surreal epilogue to Jordan's unearthly sport's life will peter out sadly over the coming months. No one believes the best of Jordan is in the future. But just maybe, at the age of 38, his Airness, the man who in his peak was worth $10 billion to the American economy, will confound us all again.

Either way, it didn't matter in the Garden last night. Once, in simpler times, Jimmy Cannon, a New York street urchin who became the city's most beloved sports columnist, wrote of baseball god Babe Ruth: "He was a parade all by himself: a burst of dazzle and jingle."

When number 23 spun in for his first basket of this new century, those words never seemed more alive.