These past two weeks of All-Time Kicks goodness have to rank as one of the best #NBArank incarnations yet.
A veritable Christmas/Hanukkah/Festivus/Fill In Your Preferred Holiday gift unto itself.
No longer, though, can we merely spectate from the sidelines here at Stein Line HQ.
Are you ready for the real top five? (Or at least the top five from a nearly 50-year-old who refuses to believe he's too old to be a sneakerhead?)
Who knows more about rankings, after all, than the Committee (of One)?
Herewith, then, follows our top five hoops kicks of all time:
1. Nike Air Darwin Low Canvas
The Air Darwin is most commonly associated with Dennis Rodman, who wasn't exactly known for inspiring overnight campouts for sneaker seekers. But Rodman's preferred Darwin was actually the leather high-top version.
My favorite hoops shoe of all time is the low-top model in glorious canvas.
The sexiest hoops shoe I've ever seen.
As a rookie beat writer covering the Clippers for the Los Angeles Daily News, I fell in love with the low-cut model when I saw Danny Manning wearing leather lows. Yet it's the canvas iteration that I find utterly irresistible.
Sadly, though, I have only one used pair in my possession. And they're literally falling apart. In my mid-20s, I hadn't yet learned the important maxim that my 13-year-old son has since ingrained in me: Buy at least "one to rock and one to stock" when you know the shoe is an all-timer.
Yet I continue to dream, as I have for countless years, that Nike will bring back the Air Darwin Low (in leather if not in canvas) for a surprise reissue. So if you're reading this Lynn Merritt or Roy Miller or Nico Harrison ... PLEASE!
2. Adidas Attitude
This is the only shoe on my list that I also saw on ESPN's official All-Time Kicks ballot, which should be all the confirmation you need that the ESPN honchos who conceived this #NBArank project wanted my old-school sentimentality nowhere near it.
The Attitude is known to sneakerheads as a shoe made famous by Patrick Ewing in his early Knicks days. To me, though, this is a thoroughly Cal State Fullerton shoe sported by prominent ballers at my university when I was a freshman.
The Adidas Conductor is a later offspring of the same concept that, as soon as I see it, takes me right back to campus in the late 1980s at Titan Tech.
One gloriously mint right shoe from a pair of Attitudes is displayed to this day in my home office on a shelf filled with CSUF artifacts.
3. Nike Terminator
When it comes to the greatest high-top I've actually worn and (saying this in the most charitable sense) played in, one word will suffice:
Terminators!
I loved these beyond reason. I (laughably) thought they made me tougher. I bought into that ridiculously false premise to such a degree that I actually wore these on occasion in doubles matches for the 1987 El Toro High tennis team.
The Terminators, to be clear, were not designed for tennis ... not that you could have pried them off my feet.
They were the supremely distinctive shoes, of course, that helped make Georgetown so menacing in the heyday of John Thompson and Ewing, with a never-goes-out-of-style design that should be readily available at stores everywhere.
So bring these back too, Nike!
4. Nike Air Lambaste Low
I, like Kobe Bryant, will always prefer a soccer-style sneaker in a low cut over a high-top.
And these sleek beauties -- popularized by Penny Hardaway -- hooked me just like the Darwins did.
They were a staple of the mid-1990s when I was just starting out as an NBA writer who, in my mid-20s, was paying a lot more attention to shoes than I do now.
Hardaway wore these in the 1995 All-Star Game -- which happens to be the first All-Star Game that I ever covered -- but the Lambastes somehow landed only 12th on a Complex list of the top 15 shoes Penny ever sported.
And they're the sneaker experts?
5. Nike Air Jordan Shattered Backboard 1s
This is a difficult but unavoidable admission in the name of full transparency: I am no longer the foremost Michael Jordan expert in my own family.
That honor goes to my teenager, who was born six months too late to even witness MJ's final All-Star Game but who, for reasons I don't fully comprehend, has made it his middle school mission to study Jordan's career and year-by-year Nike lineage as if he's getting college credits for it.
I'm just the opposite. Unlike my son, or MJ-obsessed ESPN colleagues such as J.A. Adande and Ohm Youngmisuk, I would have been perfectly fine with submitting a list that ignored the Air Jordan phenomenon completely.
I've never owned a pair and never felt the need.
But because I love my boy beyond reason -- and because he said he'd stop speaking to me if I didn't relent -- I'm including the one pair of Jordans in circulation that I admit could make even stubborn me cave.
I saw these for the first time last season while shadowing the Warriors. Andre Iguodala had them on as part of his typically haute couture postgame ensemble one night.
Given my total lack of Air Jordan sophistication, mind you, my reaction was: I never knew Jordan 1s came in Buffalo Braves colors.
No, stupid.
Leave it to young Alexander Stein to educate me on how this colorway was conceived in homage to the jersey colors His Airness was wearing when he shattered a backboard in Italy on a Nike promotional tour in the summer of 1985.
Honorable mention: "Liquid Metal" Nike Tiempo '94 Mid
Here's the closest thing to a nominee from the modern day you'll get from me: Nike's glitzy basketball twist on a soccer shoe that actually debuted in the '90s.
LeBron James brought these into worldwide focus when he wore them on an off day at the 2015 NBA Finals.
These delicious shoes debuted in November 2014 and, well, any of my friends or colleagues feeling terribly charitable are welcome to send me a pair or two in size 11.
In "Metallic Silver" or "Metallic Gold."
I'm easy.