And so he would, including getting old.
At 33, the oldest first-team all-N.B.A. player by six years, Bryant showed how secure his hard-won, oft-lost and occasionally forfeited esteem has become, as a new nickname burst forth, as if sung by a choir of sports anchors — the Masked Mamba! — saluting his 102-point, three-game run after Dwyane Wade broke his nose in the All-Star Game.
In this career, only Bryant gets to turn the pages of the calendar.
Similarly, only Bryant gets to define himself, even if he is not sure who he is supposed to be with all the personae he has tried out — boyish, Jordanesque, sinister, too cool for school — as if he has worn masks all along.
Jerry West, then the Lakers' general manager, met Bryant at 17, marveling not only at his skill level, but also at seeing the player for whom he would trade center Vlade Divac play video games with his 16-year-old son, Ryan, like any other youngster from the neighborhood.
That was several personae ago, but West, now a Golden State consultant, said: "Kobe Bryant is always going to be Kobe Bryant. He's going to play the game differently. He's going to approach it differently.
"I heard someone say he doesn't enjoy the game. The hell he doesn't. He just looks on it as war."
In games, Bryant is a study in modes of aggression, from painstakingly calibrated to untamed.
Off the floor, little seems to faze him — not this season's start; or Chris Paul's slipping through the Lakers' hands; or the departures of Phil Jackson, Lamar Odom and Derek Fisher; or the bumpy transition to a new coach, Mike Brown.
"Well, I've been through it before, so I understand the process that goes around it," Bryant said after a recent game. "And this time around, it's not as bad as it was before. I actually have some players."
Everything about Bryant's career is a little different. In 2010, a team broadcaster's passing mention of him as "the greatest Laker" prompted a wave of protest in favor of Magic Johnson or West.
Johnson was known for his smile, West for the heartache he wore on his sleeve. Bryant, a walking contradiction if he did anything that slowly, is barely known at all.
As ferocious in his quest for privacy as he is in his quest for fame, Bryant fumed when The Orange County Register reported that he had married in 2001.
If Bryant's life is a mission, it goes back almost as far as he can remember, to when he was 6. That is how old he was, he said once, when he realized he had a destiny.
In 27 years, he has never wavered from his mission, which is why he did so much so young and why he was so devastated in the down years, when he wondered if he had won his last title at 23.
When Shaquille O'Neal zinged him from his new home in Miami in 2004 and the departed Jackson called him uncoachable, Bryant was the game's most shunned superstar. Desperate to show that his new team could win that season, Bryant jumped all over Seattle's Ray Allen in the exhibition opener. An offended Allen predicted: "In about a year or two, he'll be calling out to Jerry Buss that 'we need some help in here' or 'trade me.' We'll all be saying, 'We told you so,' when he says that."
It turned out to be three seasons, but the rest was correct.
Bryant's cool deserted him in the spring of 2007 in a weeklong rant on radio, on television and in print, accusing Buss of selling him out and demanding to be traded.
For the cherry atop the sundae of his embarrassment, Bryant let three fans record a video — they posted it online — showing him railing at the Lakers' refusal to trade Andrew Bynum for Jason Kidd and calling Buss "an idiot."
Bryant, who rarely acknowledged having doubts, wrote a first-person article for Dime magazine in 2006, saying that "my biggest fear is not winning another title" and that his mission had made him "an outcast my entire life."
With a daughter as old as he was when he divined his quest, he even wondered about his mission.
"Am I supposed to obsess myself with winning, only to win, retire and wonder if all my sacrifices were worth it?" Bryant wrote. "Is it O.K. for me to sacrifice time away from my children, watching them grow up, missing Easter, Christmas and other special moments to win a ring?"
In a stunning turnaround, the Lakers won his heart back in the 2007-8 season as Bynum emerged and Pau Gasol arrived. They lost to Boston in the finals that year, but titles followed in 2009 and 2010, giving Bryant five or, as he noted gleefully, one more than O'Neal.
In the 2009-10 season, Bryant dislocated a finger on his shooting hand, deciding against surgery; sustained a back injury that forced him out of the All-Star Game; and developed a sore knee that he (much) later acknowledged was "almost bone on bone" by the time of the finals against Boston.
Despite the injury and four titles, when Bryant was ineffective in back-to-back losses to Oklahoma City in the first round, three local columnists suggested he was pouting.
Not coincidentally, Bryant had a prickly relationship with the news media in general, and the closer to home they were, the pricklier it became.
Now, with the Lakers careening along, Bryant is more relaxed than he has been since his early years in the N.B.A., no longer edgy with reporters, cordial once more with some Lakers staffers he had shunned for years.
With teammates hinting they would like Jackson's triangle back and otherwise testing Brown regularly, as when Bynum was benched for taking a 3-pointer and announced he would take more, Bryant remains his coach's rock, even while shooting about 43 percent. Benched in the fourth quarter of a recent loss, Bryant punched a chair but stood by his coach afterward. ("I've had his back the whole season," Bryant said. "I can't start doing something crazy now.")
However the Lakers' season ends, Johnson and West said, Bryant has proved he is the greatest Laker.
"His greatness is taken for granted," West said. "Everyone knows how great he is, but you can't look inside. What's inside makes him. Forget the talent. He's got something inside that no one can measure."
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