Hyde: A goodbye for the ages as Dwyane Wade leaves in style | Commentary

In the end, the goodbye was such a great-bye it was hard to know how to feel on the way out. Happy? Sad? Proud? Empty?

Emotional for what happened Tuesday night, as even Dwyane Wade seemed when he took the pre-game microphone as fans chanted, “M-V-P?”

“You’re going to make me cry before this game,” Wade said.

Or maybe it was an injection of pure nostalgia for what how Tuesday played out over 16 years. Even Wade stared up at the videos of his youth in 2003, of tributes from his friends like LeBron James, of even his son, Zaire, giving one final, announcer-style, “D-WAAAAYNE WAAAADE.”

Haslem, in his opening minutes, naturally drew an offensive foul. And that drew a loud cheer from the crowd. And then Wade banked in a 3-point shot. A louder cheer.

Wade then stepped behind the line for yet another 3-pointer. The loudest cheer. Then Haslem hit a shot. And Wade banked in another 3-pointer. And, well, you get the point of how it all went.

The night seemed to be choreographed that way, in a good way. It wasn’t just Wade’s smile or his sons’ witnessing. Shaq and LeBron had videos saluting Wade. So did another retired kid from Chicago.

“From all of us who are fans of the game,” former President Barack Obama said, “we just want to congratulate you for an extraordinary career, one for the record books. I hope the next chapter in your life is just as fulfilling, just as spectacular, as this one.”

Then his younger son, Zion, who talked for a while before dispensing with the, “sweet stuff.” He looked into the camera. “Don’t lose your last home game.”

Dad didn’t.

“I expect you go for at least 50,” Zaire then said.

Dad didn’t get that. He got 30 points. For a long while, it looked like he was content just to stay in the flow of the game rather than be the centerpiece of it. He had 13 points at half. He had 16 at the end of three quarters.

But then came that fourth quarter when the shots kept coming, and the bank shots kept falling. At one point there in the end, after an actual miss, he fell into the front-row seats of his friends, singer John Legend and model Chrissy Teigen.

They all laughed. It was that portion of this ending. Wade even threw a ball off the backboard and tried to dunk it home over a Philadelphia defender. OK, that didn’t work.

Everything else did. The only sad part, the one cheered and cheered, was Tuesday came to an end when Wade was pulled to a career ovation with 62 seconds left. Or maybe that was the happy part? It was all a jumble of emotion by then.

The only sure thing is the greatest career in South Florida sports just closed.