Just Call It the International Basketball Association

On the last day of the NBA season, they shuffled a dozen or so reporters into a small room of a Cleveland steakhouse, promising us lunch if we watched a documentary about basketball and Africa. "Hoopland" followed four Senegalese boys and their families for a year, detailing their pain as much as their passion.

When one of them -- a warm, 7-foot rail named Assane Sene -- is told that a prep school in Connecticut, South Kent, has offered him a scholarship, he breaks down and cries on the screen. There are two outdoor basketball courts in his country of 11.7 million.

"Some days, I can't believe I'm here," he told me after the film was finished. He was invited to attend the screening by Amadou Gallo Fall, the vice president of international affairs and director of scouting for the Dallas Mavericks. Fall started the SEEDS Academy (Sports For Education and Economic Development in Senegal), which brings together students and ballplayers from all over Senegal to study, train and dream the dream American kids have had forever.

The difference is, the kids from Senegal aren't one-in-a-million shots. Assane Sene is a one-in-11.7 million shot.

"I got some colleges calling me," he said, smiling. "I got Syracuse college calling me. UCLA, they call me. Florida. Virginia call me. Miami college."

Africa is regarded as the next Serbia, Croatia or Latin America to many NBA executives, the new frontier for talent from abroad. For all the charitable efforts by the NBA, for every kid pursuing an education rather than just a contract, even Fall acknowledged of the schools who award scholarships, "At the end of the day, they're interested that the kid can play."

To all the homegrown talents worried about David Stern outsourcing America's game, that ship has sailed. Just look at who won the NBA championship three of the last five years, who won the last World Championship and the last Olympic gold medal.

Twenty-seven teams passed on Tony Parker, the MVP in San Antonio's four-game sweep of Cleveland, in the NBA draft. Manu Ginobili, who led the Spurs with 27 points in Game 4, was picked in the second round. Of the Spurs, Ginobili said, "They knew something nobody else knew."

They knew to think big-picture when it came to building an NBA champion.

The story of how Ginobili fell in love with the NBA bears repeating. As a child, he and his basketball-playing brothers would stay up late on Sunday nights and watch an edited highlight package in Argentina. It was put together by a soccer analyst named Adrian Paenza, who went up to Stern's office in New York and got the commissioner to sell him international TV rights for a paltry sum of $2,000 in 1984. Ginobili was enraptured by those highlights, and watched his first NBA Finals in 1991, when Michael Jordan's Bulls beat Magic Johnson's Lakers.

"I don't know if it was a great business deal, but it was inspiring for a lot of us," Ginobili said. "It made me want to grow up and become an NBA player, even if no one believed that was possible at the time."

He didn't have any posters of fútbol icon Diego Maradona above his headboard. "No, all Jordan," Ginobili said.

Five of the last six years, the NBA MVP was awarded to a player not born in the continental United States. Tim Duncan (U.S. Virgin Islands) has won it twice, Steve Nash (Canada) twice and now Dirk Nowitzki (Germany). We shouldn't be baffled anymore when a Hall of Fame coach like Larry Brown has LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony and Duncan on the same roster and loses to a Argentina team featuring Ginobili and Fabricio Oberto.

It's the world's game now. We just invented it.

And there's nothing wrong with that reality, especially when we continue to use the game as a tool for something better.

The NBA Players Association announced an initiative to feed one million children in Kenya the other day. Ira Newble, the socially conscious reserve forward for the Cavaliers, brought 15 young men from the Sudan to be his guest for Game 4. They call them the Lost Boys, 15 refugees from the Darfur region who came to Cleveland in 1991 with help from several religious charities.

One of them, Randolph Peter, told me he lost his brother to the country's civil war. He now works as a houseman at a Cleveland hotel and hopes soon to become an American citizen. He is a member of the Dinka tribe, which represents different clans and subclans in Sudan. In Darfur alone, genocide has cost more than 400,000 people their lives, according to United Nations estimates.

The conflict bothered Newble so much he sent a letter to China, a huge trading partner with Darfur, urging the government to put economic pressure on Darfur to "end the agony."

Many players signed Newble's petition, but LeBron James was not among them. Whether the rumor was true -- that James had been advised against it by Nike, many of whose products are made in China -- seemed irrelevant. The bigger issue involved a marginal NBA player such as Newble caring about something bigger than himself and the game that afforded him a life many Africans will never have.

Compassion and perspective, that's what Assane Sene told me he hopes to bring back to Senegal if he ever makes it to the NBA. On the last day of the season, watching him weep in the documentary was more moving than anything that happened during San Antonio's championship celebration hours later.

"It's exciting for me to come here and be educated and maybe play in a college," he said. "More exciting than anything in the world."

We think we care about the game. But we don't care the way Assane Sene does. It's already given him so much more than he ever dreamed.