Magic Johnson has finished giving a speech in a high school gymnasium when he asks the students if they have any questions.

A girl shyly raises her hand and moves to the microphone.

"I don't really have a question," she says. "I just want to know if I can come up there and give you a hug."

Within moments, the entire student body descends upon Johnson, grabbing his massive hands, clinging to his broad shoulders, embracing him from to shoes to smile, covering his massive body with admiration and love.

"And to think, 20 years ago, some people were afraid to touch me," Johnson says.

Where were you? It was 3 p.m. on the afternoon of Nov. 7, 1991, and if you lived in Los Angeles, you know where you were.

It was our Kennedy assassination moment, our Challenger space shuttle moment, a moment when the Southland lost its sports innocence.

Where were you? I was home on vacation after spending the summer covering the Dodgers for this newspaper. I was watching television while my two young children played in the background. Soon they were crying because their father was crying, and at the time I didn't even know Magic Johnson.

The greatest Laker ever announced he was retiring at age 32 because he had contracted one of the most awful diseases imaginable.

"Because of the HIV virus that I have obtained, I will have to retire from the Lakers today," Johnson said in a packed room at the Forum.

We shuddered. We froze. Then we called everyone we knew, and into the phone together, all of us at once, we screamed.

Did the most alive athlete in the history of Los Angeles really just announce he was dying?

At the time, it was assumed that everyone who had the HIV virus would eventually contract AIDS, which meant Magic Johnson would be gone in 10 years. Those were the statistics. That was the reality.

There was only one smile at the news conference, only one mention of hope. It came from Johnson himself, and we pitied him for it.

"I plan to go on living for a long time," he said, and you probably did not believe him.

We did not know. How did he know?

Monday is not the 20th anniversary of a death, but perhaps the most stirring rebirth in the history of American sports.

Twenty years after contracting a disease that was supposed to kill him, Magic Johnson is killing the disease by using his celebrity to raise millions for AIDS research.

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