Make your community better, whatever that looks like. Or just live with the joy Dikembe did. Long after his playing days were over, he embraced the Cookie Monster jokes. The smile never faded.

Mutombo walked over to the regulation-sized 10-foot hoop, got on his tiptoes and hit the bottom of it with his finger. “Come on, son,” Riley recalls Thompson saying.

That’s how Mutombo did it. “He had a Cookie Monster laugh,” Jerome Williams, a nine-year NBA vet, said Friday. “Everybody knew he was having fun all the time.