Kobe Bryant’s decision on Sunday to announce his retirement, effective at the end of the current season, was timely and proper and even a bit quixotic, coming as it did in the form of a poem written by the player and posted on a somewhat obscure players forum.

What he addressed in those words was his realization that he will be leaving the stage soon, and his tribute to fans was fitting, giving that their shouts and cheering and applause validated every success he enjoyed as a Los Angeles Laker.

It always is difficult to close the door behind a life’s work, and how hard must it be for the elite athlete, who not only walks away from the adulation and the spotlight of professional sports, but also usually steps directly into middle age, giving up his attempt to hold on to the youth that served him so well, right along with his hopes for continued success (even mastery?) in his chosen field.

It gets a bit harder for Kobe, too, in that his coming departure already is being heralded as the final hoops appearances of a man whose entire approach to basketball increasingly has been set aside as irrelevant, wrong-headed, even while he plays out the final months of his career.

A colleague of mine, young enough to barely remember the first half of Kobe’s career, is a great fan of the NBA, but also a devotee to the statistical parsing of the game — common to every sports endeavor these days — and an enthusiastic proponent of what seems to be a new game — “pace and space” and all that the San Antonio Spurs and, now, the Golden State Warriors have brought the game.

And in The National today he, in a kindly way, suggested not only that no one will play the game the way Kobe Bryant did, but that they should not.

This all hinges on current thinking that successful basketball properly should be played in the paint and on the other side of the three-point line, suggesting strong that misguided NBA oldsters (like Kobe), and their sentimental fans, who come from a simpler age, have missed the train heading for the future.

Kobe, my colleague demonstrates statistically in the essay linked above, spent much of his attacking career in that zone of the floor now usually considered off limits, by the new thinkers.

That shooting percentages in the distance from about 6 feet away from the basket to the three-point line, are not high enough to warrant scorers spending much time there. And as he notes, Kobe spent a large fraction of his time in that area increasingly regarded as a “dead zone”.

The “modern” game demands layups or threes, facilitated by rapid passing and an avoidance of  the ball stopping with one “star”, like Kobe, whose second-half-of-his-career signature fall-away shot from mid-range, already is an anachronism.

The subtext being it (and he) ought to be hurried out of the game lest some misguided coach or player find it interesting to shoot 15-footers.

Thus, the difficulties with Kobe’s announcement, effective at the end of the season, are these.

1. He is a shadow of the player he was, and by playing as many as 60 more games with the Lakers … well, it gives fans a chance to see him one more time, but also a chance to see an athlete whose transcendent talents largely have deserted him.

2. And, on a more subtle level, the end already is being cast as the exit of a dinosaur, a man too stubborn or unenlightened to grasp the “new” way of threes and dunks embodied by the champion Warriors and Stephen Curry.

The latter issue may hurt Bryant more than the former.

No one wants to confront his fading abilities, when the whole of his career had been praised, but to be told that he was doing it all wrong … that his legacy is a style of basketball as anachronistic as the two-hand set shot … that has to be particularly difficult.

The notion that he has been “betrayed by his body” is interesting, in the sense that he always thought he could push his corporal being to serve his mental demands and expectations.

But no one who is 37, like Bryant, with as many injuries as he has suffered, can rightfully expect to be 80 percent of the athlete he was at 30, let alone 25.

Thus, these final months will be bittersweet, and the denoument to his career may seem to be about four months longer than it ought to be.

All those nights on the road where he is feted for his five championships, for his ascendancy in the game as the link between Michael Jordan and LeBron James … it could for him feel like an inescapable burden. God help him, if he is presented with rocking chairs, as traditionally has been the sort of gag gift given to the oldster leaving the stage.

And not just any oldster. One who, apparently, never really grasped the proper way to play the game, at least as framed by “progressive and the modern” analysts of it. At best, he will be cast as a pre-modern player; at worst, a man who indulged his passion for “hero ball”, when we all know, now, it was the wrong way to play the game.

He is doing the right thing, but it will be hard for him. Harder than we perhaps can fully grasp.