“I’m just really happy to be in this moment right now,” Bryant said on Saturday, his mood clearly enhanced by the proximity of a fourth championship.

For nearly two weeks, Bryant had been locked in a perpetual scowl — his demeanour dark and his answers clipped. He did strange things with his chin.

But the Los Angeles Lakers now hold a 3-1 lead in the finals, and the grimace has faded as quickly as the Orlando Magic. The Lakers can clinch the championship on Sunday night at Amway Arena.

Title talk was off limits for the last two weeks. Bryant gently embraced it on Saturday. “I think this one is special,” he said, “because you rarely have the opportunity to get back up the mountain twice in a career.”

Different era

The Lakers won three championships from 2000 to 2002, but that was a different time and a different team. Shaquille O’Neal dominated, in play and personality. Bryant gritted his teeth and played understudy. It has been seven years since they celebrated anything. The Lakers missed the play-offs once, were eliminated in the first round twice and so frustrated Bryant that he demanded a trade.

This is Bryant’s time and Bryant’s team. He has been a forceful scorer in this series (33 points per game) and a skilled playmaker (8 assists). Only Michael Jordan in 1991 and Jerry West in 1970 have averaged 30 points and 8 assists in the first four games of the finals.

If the Lakers win the championship—- and no team have lost the finals after taking a 3-1 lead — Bryant will be a lock to win his first finals Most Valuable Player award.

Special one

It would be the franchise’s 15th championship and Bryant’s fourth, but his first without O’Neal. That topic was among the many that evoked cold sentence fragments from Bryant when the finals began.

“It definitely means a lot to him,” said the former Lakers guard Tyronn Lue, who now plays for the Magic. “He’ll probably say it doesn’t, but the competitor he is, he definitely wants to win without Shaq to prove everybody wrong.”

O’Neal earned his fourth championship in 2007, with Miami. With his next ring, Bryant will join O’Neal and the San Antonio Spurs’s Tim Duncan as the most decorated superstars in the post-Jordan era. He will move that much closer to matching Jordan’s set of six.

Someone mentioned the possibility, and Bryant batted it away, but this time with humour. “I’m trying to get this damn fourth one,” he said with a laugh.

Even discussion of Bryant’s future, a subject that usually irritates him, became fodder for one-liners. “I have a decision about my future?” he said, coyly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

When another reporter probed further — “because you just brought it up” — Bryant quickly corrected him: “I didn’t bring it up. I deflected.” More laughter.

But no, Bryant said, he cannot imagine playing for anyone other than the Lakers, which should be comforting to Los Angeles fans, though not surprising.