Kane, Rose delighted us together, but great stories do end

It’s hard to recall two more dynamic, crowd-pleasing young performers enlivening Chicago within a year of each other the way Patrick Kane and Derrick Rose did. Maybe Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers with the Bears a half-century ago?

Kane was a shaggy-haired, fuzzy-cheeked 19-year-old when he won the NHL’s rookie of the year award with the Blackhawks in 2007-08. A kid? You bet he was — he slept in the boss’ basement and hung out with his two little guys to ease the transition to big-city life.

Rose was a candy-gobbling 20-year-old when he earned the NBA rookie award for the Bulls one year later, a conquering hero returning to his hometown, grateful to have escaped the unforgiving streets that had claimed so many of his contemporaries.

What a great story.

Patrick Kane and Derrick Rose. Each of them an enhanced, precocious talent with youthful elan — an innocence, almost — that suggested he’d be just as happy working his magic on a lumpy frozen pond or an outdoor playground with no nets. Earning millions for entertaining 20,000 fans every night was a happy byproduct of being great at something they loved doing and would probably do for free. We couldn’t get enough of them.

And we’d like to say they grew up before our eyes, except we can’t be sure they have.

Given Kane’s proclivity for off–ice mischief, he seemed the less likely candidate for long-term prosperity here, especially after last summer, when a deadly serious sexual-assault allegation threatened to interrupt, if not end, his NHL career and send him off to jail.

But he “weathered it,” as the hockey announcers say, and maybe it scared him straight. For there Kane was Wednesday, at the pinnacle of his profession, with the Art Ross Trophy as NHL scoring leader in one hand and the Hart Trophy as its most valuable player in the other.

Rose’s Wednesday wasn’t so glorious. He was traded to the New York Knicks on the eve of the NBA draft, exiled from Chicago in an unceremonious manner unbecoming for a rookie of the year, MVP and home-town hero. And except for the kids at Murray Park, where Rose learned the game and where he remains a symbol of hope in hopelessly bleak surroundings, nobody much cared.

What a sad story.

But the NBA is a cold business, and business decisions don’t allow room for sentiment. Rose at 27 is not the same player he was at 21. Not even close, really — his knees a casualty of the explosive energy that defined his style. He has missed more games than he has played in more than the last four seasons. Declining productivity, limited availability and a big contract left Rose with minimal value to a Bulls team in desperate need of an overhaul, so the decision was pretty simple: trade him while he’ll still bring something in return.

Understood. But why so much good-riddance glee over his departure?

It’s not Rose’s fault he kept getting hurt, any more than it was Mark Prior’s as he devolved from Cubs pitching phenom into textbook model for an anatomy class. But we tend to eat our young once they stop performing at the level expected of them, no matter the reason.

“He should be playing! He’s been cleared!” Those cries began as Rose sat out the 2013 playoffs in a nice suit while flu-ridden Nate Robinson hurled into a trash can as the shorthanded Bulls were bringing out the dog in the Brooklyn Nets. They never subsided.

Athletes know their bodies better than their doctors do, and Rose didn’t want to play unless he could play like Derrick Rose. Character flaw? Who’s to say? His most persistent critics included one knee-surgery veteran who seemed to equate lighting up talk-show callers with elevating over Dwight Howard for a runner. Sorry, slightly different stress levels.

Rose rarely did a good job of explaining himself. The Bulls could have been more helpful, as could his much-maligned “camp.” It seems the same forces that sheltered Rose from neighborhood dangers never bothered to prepare him for life in the public eye. Thus he was given to public pronouncements that were mystifyingly dumb, insensitive or both. And he was torched for saying what was on his mind.

We roll our eyes at athletes’ buzz words — “We played hard, followed the game plan, got the win” — and they are truly boring, but so much safer, especially in New York.

Peace, Derrick. Such a great story shouldn’t end so badly.