Kyrie

For most of its existence Kyrie lived inside liturgy: Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy, the Greek petition that opens the Christian mass and has been set to music by Bach, Mozart, and Palestrina. The root is kyrios — lord — one of the oldest titles in New Testament Greek. Then a point guard from Melbourne arrived in the NBA.

Kyrie Irving's rookie season in 2012 was the moment American parents discovered the name outside the cathedral. He pronounced it KY-ree, and the name broke into the U.S. top 1,000 for boys that same year, crossing from sacred to athletic in a single season. It now sits at rank 235, a name that carries two histories simultaneously without either one canceling the other out.

The syllable count compresses a lot of sound into a small space — two beats, the first holding the weight, the second staying open. It pairs cleanly with names around it — Kyrie Louis, Kyrie Nash, Kyrie Grant — and carries no obvious nickname, which suits a name this compact. The boy named Kyrie tends to be someone who moves through a room differently than other people do — a particular quality of attention in the way he watches, a sense that he already knows which direction the play is going.