He was a name in the newspaper, or maybe the cover of Sports Illustrated. He had a terrific nickname — “The Great One” says it all, after all — and he had already begun piling up numbers and records that almost read like fiction.

When Wayne Gretzky was still 22 years old, he had already won four Hart Trophies, awarded to the NHL’s most valuable player, and three Ross Trophies, given to the league’s most prolific scorer. He was already being compared the Gordie Howes, the Bobby Orrs, the Rocket Richards — the very best who’d ever played the game.

But here was the thing: you rarely actually saw him.

If you lived in Canada, sure, he was already a regular on Hockey Night telecasts. But there was no NHL Network. The league’s TV scope was severely limited. And even if they’d been available, Gretzky played most of his games in the Mountain time zone. A lot of East Coast papers didn’t ever get the Oilers’ game summaries in their morning editions.

The legend of Wayne Gretzky was a word-of-mouth deal, even as late as 1983, when the Oilers qualified for their first Stanley Cup finals, against the Islanders. True-blue New York hockey fans relished the three or four times a year Gretzky played at Madison Square Garden or Nassau Coliseum, before he disappeared into the ether.

“As good as he is,” Gretzky’s coach in 1983, Glenn Sather, said on the eve of those Cup finals, “I’m not sure how many people know just how good he is.”

Amazingly, there is a similar vibe around Nikola Jokic as the Nuggets and the Heat prepare to kick off the NBA Finals on Thursday night at Denver’s Ball Arena. Jokic has been either the best or second-best player in the sport for three straight years. But for a late-season drop-off after the Nuggets wrapped everything up with a month to spare, he’d likely have three straight MVP trophies on his shelf.

And he has done much of that in relative peace and quiet. The Nuggets have never been darlings among the NBA’s TV partners. They are a Western Conference team, so even when those games are on TV they don’t usually start until 9 or 10 o’clock Eastern time.

In 1983, a unicorn like Wayne Gretzky really could sneak up on the general public.

In 2023, it is almost impossible.

And yet many casual basketball fans are at last getting full exposure to Jokic and his easy-on-the-eyes game, one that incorporates elite traditional big-man skills with an innate ability to make, not just the proper pass, but the perfect one. If you watch just one Nuggets game, it becomes clear not only that Jokic makes his teammates better, but also that those mates having a hell of a good time playing with him.

And the praise isn’t limited to his teammates.

“Joker might be the best player in the league,” Portland’s Damian Lillard said last week. “Smart as hell, he can shoot, he passes, he plays team ball, he cares about winning, he’s humble, he stays true, I like how Joker [does] his thing.”

Said LeBron James after his Lakers were swept out of the Western finals by Jokic and the Nuggets: “When you have a guy like Jokic, as big as he is, but also as cerebral as he is, you can’t really make many mistakes versus a guy like that. And even when you guard him for one of the best possessions that you think you can guard him, he puts the ball behind his head Larry Bird style and shoots it 50 feet in the air and it goes in.

“So you do like this to him,” and with that, James mimicked tipping his cap.

Jokic certainly must be hoping his first taste of the national glare goes better than Gretzky’s did. Gretzky scored zero goals as his Oilers were swept by the dynasty Islanders in 1983. He got plenty of opportunities to rectify that. So should Jokic, who will be an NBA force for years to come — even if his days as a top-secret sleeper weapon are officially coming to an end.

(Interestingly, the athlete who’ll replace him as our lowest-profile superstar is probably Gretzky’s spiritual heir in Edmonton, Connor McDavid, who soon likely will win his third Hart Trophy at age 26.)

It is Jokic’s time, and he is a joy to watch. He is a player driven simply by excellence, and not motivated, as Michael Jordan and Tom Brady were before him, by the fact he somehow fell to 41st in the 2014 draft (though if you want to do it to yourself, remember that the Knicks took Cleanthony Early at No. 34).

“It’s never about looking backwards with him,” Denver coach Mike Malone said. “It’s always about looking forward and challenging himself to be the best player that he can be.”

If Thursday night is your first time watching the Jokic Show? Sit back. Enjoy. It’s an awfully fun spectacle.