On Thursday, LeBron James will take the court for The Finals in a seventh consecutive NBA season. It is his eighth career appearance in the playoffs’ ultimate round, and it comes on the heels of him passing Michael Jordan as the league’s all-time leader in playoff points scored. James, by all objective measurements, is one of the single best performers in the history of this or any sport, and as he faces a historically stacked Golden State Warriors' roster, he has a chance to notch a fourth championship so impressive that it would quash much of the rational traction within the rhetoric of those still doubting his place atop basketball’s most timeless pedestal.

Even if James sweeps and makes mincemeat of Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, and Draymond Green, though, the logic of his accomplishments will still never be enough for those predisposed to rooting against him. This is sports, after all: a cultural tradition that often acts as outlet and container for a mix of base impulses composed roughly of regionalism, nostalgia, and the egos of fans threatened ineffably by the outcomes of competition between millionaire gladiator surrogates. James, like all ascendant athletes, will always enjoy a legacy that fights against this irrational exuberance. There is no definitive number, moment, or achievement that can save him from the haters.

The man he has just passed in second season points, Jordan, stands as the myth James battles with the most. This has always been the case, but it is now more than ever. LeBron has reached The Finals two occasions more than Jordan, too, but matching his six championship trophies is a ways off. Not, again, that this would really matter to those glued to the truth of M.J.’s unquestionable status as the game’s greatest. There is the glory of childhoods and neighborhoods and fathers attached to that pole, flags flying from it that can’t come down even if there did exist the time machine necessary to carry out all the thought experiments put forward in the ceaseless comparative arguments about these two.

At the end of it, it doesn’t matter whether you think James is better than Jordan like it doesn’t matter whether you believe in human evolution. Twenty years from now, someone else will be doing things LeBron couldn’t dream of, because—until we hit the decline of civilization itself—this is how it works. (That next person may even be his son, LeBron James, Jr.) What is at stake in these legacy years of James’ career is not the proof of whether James is better than Jordan. If he hasn’t shown that to you already, then you weren’t paying attention when they taught you science, if ever they taught you science. No, what is on the line now is LeBron’s chance to convince you, despite all the stubborn ghosts inside of a fan; now is his moment to convert the non-believers.

The 2017 Finals has James firmly in the throes of moment making, in the cinema of it. Here he can be a hero, enacting (quite flawed, but widely felt) struggles of values as more of America hopes for his victory than otherwise against the largesse of the Silicon Valley Warriors, overly rich with the talents of Durant after an offseason free agency coup. Just as a rational person can’t deny that James is the more evolved talent than Jordan, an evidence-collecting observer knows that LeBron hasn’t dominated the public imagination in the same way that his coolly bald predecessor did. In these, his most grizzled, masterful, and challenging days, he stands at one end of a blockbuster tension that gives him hope to change that tale.

As the Cavs-Warriors rivalry chugs on in its era-defining glee, so rise the waters on James’ legend. The stunning heroics of his Game 7 chasedown block on Andre Iguodala in last year’s Finals is The LeBron Moment to date, and surely the things it did to the hearts watching it turned a not-inconsiderable number of viewers into faithfuls of his greatness. How many more people would be willing to place him over Jordan in their NBA hierarchy, though, had he completed the potential exclamation point of a barely missed, off-balance dunk over an aggressive Draymond Green in the game’s closing moments? It’s in the theatrical burden of these moments that objectively excellent athletes turn into figures of orthodoxy. It’s a great privilege to watch James as he enjoys his zenith and grapples within this generational arena, vying to control all the energy of all the possible narratives that everyone feels with a singular control of time and space and imagination. James is competing against the Warriors, the phantom of Jordan, and for the awards of sport so majestic that it turns into culture. That he might be able to win over all those forces makes these Finals unmissable.