Disturbing amounts of unprecedented shock, awe, anger, anxiety and depression. All at once. All of that helped to comprise what was my immediate reaction, which I’m sure was felt by many others like me.

In the days leading up to this, I was well aware of the increasing possibility of the man formerly known as “Flash” leaving my team, and I even acknowledged the potential benefits of his departure. Things had been getting messier than ever between the Miami Heat and Dwyane Wade for a while, and it all came to an astonishingly sad ending on the night of July 6th.

I still was not prepared for this, not even the little bit. I had convinced myself I was, but we’re all shook. Dwyane Tyrone Wade Jr., born in 1982, originally from the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, was drafted by our team on June 26th, 2003. It is now July 8th, and he is no longer a member of the Miami Heat, but instead, a member of his hometown, Chicago Bulls.

Listen, what are we doing here? Are we really freaking out and getting strangely emotional over the wildly successful sports guy and businessman prioritizing his hometown, his pride, and his financial goals over our ridiculously irrational – and even somewhat selfish – sports fandom? 

Yes.

Alexander Toledo is my name, but that name didn’t matter to me as much as the name Dwyane Wade did for a long time. I was a normal Hispanic kid from South Florida, nothing special in any way, but, somehow, always extremely lucky. I was born into a family that was never rich but always worked hard to be financially stable and comfortable. I have never dealt with what you would call real problems up to this point, through my twenty years of life. Thank God. 

And yet, this one stings so much.

I became a mindless Heat fan in 2005 after falling in love with the most aesthetically pleasing sport I’d ever seen. Soon thereafter, as a result, Wade became my hero and my idol. He was everything I wanted to be: Strong, successful, persistent, spectacular at what he did, and a guy who everyone seemed to love, too.

Not many sports fans got to witness what I did, especially not that early on.

Although my family was always just well off, I was massively spoiled from the start. My family did whatever it took to make me happy, and I reaped the benefits from their hard work – essentially getting what I wanted much more often than not. I deserved none of it, I mean, what did I do to deserve that, right? It was so easy. Perhaps that’s why this resonates with me so deeply.

In my first full season as a Heat fan, I was absolutely spoiled, man. My uncle, who was the only person in my family who cared about the team, and who was one of the primary reasons I became so obsessed with the game of basketball, decided he’d take me to a game. He bought some tickets, 300 level.

I was so excited. While we were walking to the Triple-A, a stranger came up to us and handed us free tickets to the game after his friend bailed on him. Fourth row. See where I’m getting at?

I got to watch D-Wade and the rest of the team in all their glory up close, and I did nothing to earn that privilege. 

Later that year, the team won a championship. Their first. My first.

It was an incredible feeling. Triumph, celebration, and happiness in its purest form, at least for me. And Wade was in the middle of it, serving as the catalyst and the dealer, facilitating this awesome transaction where I clearly and obviously won the deal. I didn’t have to do any real work, all I did was watch some games. And yet, I got all of the same feelings the players did, or so that’s what I believed.

My uncle quite literally saved my life a few months after that and my family was insanely caring to me, providing me with everything, and, still, I didn’t appreciate him or them as much as I appreciated the feelings Wade had provided for me. Yeah, I was a good kid and I always brought home good grades at school, but everything I’d ever had was the result of hours of nothing from my part.

I was continuously spoiled. I was nine years old at the time. At such a young age, those feelings and impulses were so powerful.

Pat Riley, in a text sent to ESPN’s Dan LeBatard, perhaps described what this was like better than anyone has:

It was immensely satisfying, and I wanted more of it, and I could never really get enough.

As the years went on, I was developing as a person, and Wade continued to be a seemingly unreal force of power and success. For so many years, I watched as he continued to excel and climb the levels of legendary, unlike anyone I’d ever known. I was growing with him. So many faces changed, but a couple things remained the same, Wade, Udonis Haslem and the Miami HEAT.

Throughout my elementary, middle school and high school years, Wade and the Heat were the constant. I learned to value greatness as I watched the team go from NBA title to absolute futility, and then right back to overt greatness. Wade and the HEAT were always there. I lived and died with them. I blossomed as a person and started to figure out who I was, and part of that was my identification with the team.

In a weird way, Wade and the HEAT helped me to believe I could be more than average, even though average is how I’d always felt. Somehow, I cared so much about this ridiculously insignificant player and team, always there to sooth me.

A similar arc began in 2013, with me in the middle of my junior year of high school (my favorite year of school ever) and the HEAT in the middle of their most impressive season yet, winning in dominant fashion over and over and over again – I’m not typing “over” 27 times.

They won two more championships, and wow, did I enjoy them. I was being rewarded in the highest form, again and again. It continued when I began dating a girl. Things went extremely well from the start, we kept going, I fell in love, and over the time, I began pinning so much of my identity and self-worth to her, very similarly to what I did with the HEAT. Only this time, though, I really worked for that privilege.

Like I mentioned earlier, I always worked for my good grades, but nothing I ever did in all the years of school felt quite like the work, passion and satisfaction I felt when it came to my girlfriend. Between her, the HEAT’s continued success and my family’s generosity and care, life was treating me well. This point of my life was concentrated euphoria.

So perhaps it was fitting that everything came crashing down around me at the same time. Over the past year or so, my relationship with my girlfriend was beginning to spiral downwards. Things kept getting worse, and I stayed silent but resilient, working harder than ever to get things back to how they were before. Meanwhile, LeBron James, the greatest athletic talent of our generation (and possibly all-time), left my team after a short, but surreal period of prolonged greatness.

But it was okay because Wade re-signed for a discount to help out with roster building, something we as HEAT fans became almost uncomfortably accustomed to. Things got worse with the HEAT, too, as a result. And I knew that wouldn’t change a damn thing. I kept going, perhaps to a fault, as I watched the Heat struggle for a while and as I watched my relationship with my girlfriend unravel slowly and quite agonizingly, obstacles I knew I’d get past eventually.

And now, in a span of about a week, this entire structure I’d carved out for myself, where, outside of my family, it was all about my girlfriend and my insane sports fandom, was crumbling down to the cold, hard ground. I came to a slow realization that I had to end my relationship with the girl I was still irrationally in love with, about three-and-a-half years after we first began dating, and, coincidentally, on the exact day of the 13-year anniversary Wade was drafted to the Heat, no less.

It hurt way more than it should have, and that hasn’t changed yet, but it was time. The longer I dragged the relationship on, the more soberingly awful the realization was. I had to pull the plug, and I felt the ramifications of this instantaneously.

The pain I was feeling was made worse when, a few days later, my irrational relationship with my longtime idol came to a disappointingly sad end, after Dwyane Wade left my team two nights ago. “#Lucky13”, right?

It was time for that to end, too, after the HEAT and Wade themselves suffered through a relationship that was toxic by the end – with the final blow being an action that was, perhaps, preventative of worse measures and consequences taking place.

Dwyane Wade and my now ex-girlfriend. As ESPN’s Dan LeBatard stated promptly in his latest column for The Miami Herald: “Breakups hurt, man.”

Both of these largely influential people in my life provided feelings for me that were set up as motivation in times when I needed them to find myself while I was growing up. There was really no better time for these things to happen. Even though I worked hard whenever I really needed to, I have always had it unfairly easy.

Now, poetic justice strikes, and I’m left here dealing with the loss of my longtime hero and my longtime girlfriend. Even with that, none of this is really that important. People will always have it much worse, with the recent tragedies of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile once again proving as incredibly unfortunate reminders of some of the irreversibly horrible things going on in our world.

However, the unrelenting pain, agonizingly, depressing sorrow and general emptiness I’ve felt over the past few days – and will continue to feel for a while are very real – and this time, it’s all earned. I deserve this. We deserve this.

But, ultimately, it’s okay.

The HEAT are poised to come back from this. Hassan Whiteside was just locked up for four years on a max contract. Goran Dragic is poised to come back stronger and faster after a disappointing season which saw him excel in the second half. There might be a chance Chris Bosh returns by the start of the season. And there is an influx of great, young talent on the team, between Justise Winslow, Josh Richardson, Tyler Johnson (assuming the HEAT match the big offer sheet he received by the Brooklyn Nets), and even the newer faces of Briante Weber and Rodney McGruder.

Once again, luck is involved, with the team being fortunate enough to even have that much young talent remaining, considering the moves they’d made earlier weren’t exactly looking towards to the future. They’ll be fine, so why shouldn’t I be?

On the other hand, I know now what the feelings of happiness and satisfaction are because of the two entities that collapsed on me all at once. I am going to work to attain (and retain) those feelings for the rest of my life, not unlike anyone else who’s ever gone through a similar experience.

Finally, it’s time to move on. The Miami HEAT will, and so will I. Feelings and eras are powerful, but temporary still.

We fight. We fight. We fight.