All season long, all so many wanted to talk to Fred VanVleet about was the future.
He’s a 26-year-old Raptors guard, an integral part of a championship team who is going into a free-agent off-season, and the chatter was about how many bags of money teams might deposit on the doorstep of his Rockford, Ill. home.
He heard it — no one could avoid it — but the level of self-awareness the young man has is off the charts, and he would not bend to dreams of the future in a present that is so murky, so strange, so full of worry and dread and unanswerable questions.