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The challenge for NBA players, as the playoffs resume, is to focus on the game again

There are umpteen stories about NBA great Michael Jordan’s ability to perform on demand, no matter the surrounding circumstance, and here’s one.

In the lead-up to one of the many games of his life, so it goes, His Airness dutifully spent time in the presence of a dozen or so children from the Make A Wish foundation. In their terminally ill hopefulness, the kids lit up at the opportunity to inhabit the same room as the world’s greatest basketball player, however temporary their co-mingling.

“He made those kids’ lives that day … It was a very emotional moment for everyone involved,” Brian McIntyre, the long-time NBA communications czar, once told the Chicago Tribune.