Yes, almost everyone has written about the return of LeBron James to the city he rejected on national TV.

Many writers have delved beneath the surface to understand what the leaving, and returning, means. I’ve read plenty of articles that cover the same terrain; it’s not the decision but how it was done. James tried to cheat competition. Or he just wanted to play ball with his friends. And why all the hatred?

So I’ll break down the reasons people haven’t been writing about.

In Cleveland it matters not just THAT LeBron left and HOW he left but also WHO he left them for.

For a city that suffered Art Modell sneaking the Browns out under the cover of darkness any sort of leaving of this magnitude would trigger massive pain, especially the very public way it was done. That is a given.

But, as Dennis Kucinich says in Wright Thompson’s “BelieveLand” article on ESPN, LeBron is still young and may realize later that he made a bad decision or at least handled it badly.

We often want our superstars to actualize the best of what we are striving to be as people.

And in representing our cities to show our desires and our strengths.

To see how magical it is when that coincides with a championship season look no further than the 2010 San Francisco Giants. The team was led by a slightly built, half-Asian starting pitcher who grew out his hair, smokes pot and drops F-bombs. Very San Francisco. But the team has plenty of stoic guys, too. What was so San Francisco about the squad was not the number of outcasts but that so many diverse personalities coexisted so well.

And Cleveland thought they had that with James since he grew up in nearby Akron.

But by choosing South Beach, LeBron revealed that he didn’t reflect Cleveland at all.

Yes, the working-class ethos of Cleveland is both a stereotype and also true. The city was built on manufacturing jobs, nothing sexy or easy.

But the blue-collar image often brings to mind the factory-working descendants of European immigrants but these values were also brought by African American families heading north after the Civil War. The Great Migration was fueled by former sharecroppers seeking decent wages and less discrimination.

But racism merely took different forms up north. Housing was sharply segregated and African Americans usually got the last and worst paid factory jobs and were the first fired. However, there prevailed a similar mindset as their European counterparts: We moved here to make our lives better and we’ll work to make that happen.

That is why you’ll find the origins of the modern Civil Rights Movement along Euclid Avenue between downtown and the eastern suburbs. In the 1940s local civic groups were some of the first in the country to use nonviolence protest tactics to counter discrimination. The community didn’t just force the Euclid Beach amusement park to integrate it passed an ordinance that would fine the park for every single day it disregarded the new law.

Cleveland was the second baseball team to integrate, signing Larry Doby only 11 weeks after Jackie Robinson made his debut. The city was the first to elect an African American woman, Jean Murrell Capers, to its city council. In 1968 it became the first major U.S. city to elect an African American mayor, Carl B. Stokes.

Believing in working hard to make life better for you and yours came as much from southern sharecroppers as it did from European immigrants.

If LeBron had left the city to make his life better, that would have been grudgingly understood. If LeBron had gone to New York it would have been more tolerable. Owning Manhattan is a grand goal and New York is as gritty as it is shiny. The people and the winters can be harsh.

And New York reveres its hoops history and its icons. In some ways, that would have been an even bigger challenge than winning a championship in Ohio.

But South Beach? Can you get any more anti-Cleveland than that?

Sunny skies. Beaches. Fair-weather fans and glitz. It’s like a Clevelander expecting he or she could put in three nondescript years on an assembly line then retire to a cushy condo in Florida.

LeBron took the easy road, the road that is closed off to most of Cleveland. They resent he didn’t have the fire that they see in themselves (or want to believe they have). They are like the nice girl someone could take home to mom and who would raise a good family. And she just got ditched for the glamour girl who might be a bimbo or a brain but no one knows because she was chosen for her looks.

The man who claimed he wanted a trophy just wanted a trophy wife.

In choosing Miami LeBron not only rejected Cleveland, and did so publicly, he rejected their deeply held civic values.

For a city that had been spurned by sports teams in incredibly painful ways, this wasn’t just about the pain of James leaving but the depth of public rejection which then exacerbated past rejections.

What about LeBron?

What might he be seeking? And is he the villain people make him out to be? I certainly don’t know James and everything I do know has been filtered through other people’s ideas of him.

He sounds spoiled and self-absorbed. He’s not used to people saying no to him. That isn’t solely his fault given how everyone (including me and you as part of the sporting public) enabled him to become just that.

He’s also more aware than he’s generally given credit for.

He recognized that race plays a role in some people’s reactions to his leaving and then the media blew that up. But all he was doing was acknowledging the truth and he knows that.

And he got the fame and the money but the expectations can be the hardest to cope with. Everyone expects him to represent them, to be, as his self-serving commercial says, “what you want me to be.”

That is no small struggle for any 24-25 year old.

But most of us get to grapple with who we are in private. He’s had to do it publicly. You can say that’s a small price to pay for the wealth and adulation he’s received but it’s not.

And what he wants to be–right now–is not what Cleveland is or prides itself on being. He wants to have fun with his buddies and win titles and not be defined by what Cleveland is or wants.

Making choices based on his desires, then finding out if those experiences fulfill him, is simply what anyone does to figure out who they are. What Cleveland is probably still struggling to accept is that James could never have reflected the desires and values of Cleveland’s fans if he didn’t figure out himself first.

We’re not used to taking the long view in sports.

Everything is about this game, this season, and these present emotions. The pain of Cavalier fans and Clevelanders is real and will endure for a while. LeBron may or may not gain maturity through this process.

But only years from now will we know whether the presumed prodigal son and his former believers can create a relationship (of sorts) based on something other than the bitter past or unrealized future.