Kobe Bryant died at 41 in a helicopter crash on Sunday, and the shock of it made the world move a little slower. For some of us, it made time stop completely.

That’s because Kobe was a cultural icon—a man too young, too famous, too well-known to die so suddenly. Yet we looked up and in a flash he was gone, just a day after LeBron James moved past him on the all-time NBA scoring list in a game played in the city Kobe came from –Philadelphia.

Click here to read the entire column on WHYY.