So today is the first day in at least a decade that ESPN Zone in Times Square is shuttered, in addition to five others. Fan reactions differ on the closing.  Personally, I’m not particularly going to miss it – I don’t eat hamburgers, particularly 12 dollar ones – though it will be strange to pass through Times Square and not see it. Others have a more nostalgic view and will be remiss to see it gone.

Tat said, I do have one favorite moment when I think of ESPN Zone, which I’ve alluded to briefly, and it shows just how different things are a decade later.

Disney tried to make ESPN Zone into an “it” place, staging radio shows there and such, and for a while I think the novelty of it made it a reasonably desirable location. As time went on and the economy went to hell, the luster faded somewhat.

But back in 2000, the summer before my senior year at Duke, it was still a hot location. My friends and I were all working internships in the City, and we’d go there once in a while for chicken fingers or whatever. It was probably the only place in the City that somehow honored my shoddily created fake ID and would serve me a beer, so that was a plus.

When the NBA Draft rolled around at the end of June, we all decided to go to ESPN Zone and root for personal favorite Chris Carrawell to get drafted. We had to wait a while; he eventually was taken by the Spurs at No. 41 and didn’t make the team.

But the night itself was a good time – we commandeered a prime table early in front of some enormous TV in the main room downstairs, and had a pretty decent group of maybe 10 people. They had arcade games upstairs we could mess around with while we waited an eternity for Carrawell to get picked.

Then things got random. Right after the fourth pick, when the Bulls picked Marcus Fizer, Elton Brand – fresh off sharing NBA Rookie of the Year with Steve Francis – rolled in with his crew.

Now I knew Elton pretty well at the time, so a few of us went over there to say hello. Elton asked us if the Bulls had picked yet, and asked who they picked. When I told him it was Fizer, he got this bewildered look on his face and said, “Marcus Fizer? Why’d they pick him? We play the same position!”

We didn’t really know what to say. It was a good question. Not only did they play the same position, but Elton seemed like the sort of player you build around, a 20-10 player for years to come with a soft touch around the hoop. And Fizer was unskilled and ticketed for Europe from the start. To watch Brand now, weakened by shoulder and Achilles injuries, it belies just what a problem he was back in the early part of this decade.

Sure enough, after another year in Chicago – in which he again put up 20-10 – he was traded to the Clippers for straight-from-high-school center and habitual bust Tyson Chandler. Why the Bulls gave up on him so soon was beyond me. He averaged close to 25 points in 2006 and very nearly made the Clippers a legitimate threat for a title.

Now, obviously this was sort of a bucket list thing, telling a legitimate NBA star who his team just drafted. But what stands out to me about it is that it’ll never happen again.

Ten years later, everyone has phones that are essentially handheld computers that you can get the Internet on, check e-mail, get Twitter updates and all that.

But back then? A phone was just a phone. I mean, I didn’t even learn how to send or receive a text message until a couple years later. Before I’m branded a complete Luddite, according to Wikipedia, 17 billion texts were sent in 2000 – about three for each person in the world’s population. By 2001, it had ballooned to 250 billion. And it was 500 billion by 2004, which constitutes 100 sent by each person in the world.

It was also a time when a big-time NBA star wanted to spend time in the same place we did, and had the freedom to do that. With the nature of celebrity now, I think it’d be pretty rare to see an NBA Rookie of the Year walk into a place like that and start playing arcade games. I think celebrities now keep themselves sheltered in higher society establishments, when truth be told, a decent amount of them probably would rather play arcade games – as I saw first-hand with Kevin Durant a few months ago.

So I won’t be nostalgic for ESPN Zone in particular; the food was overpriced relative to its quality, and it was teeming with tourists.

But it’s weird to think about how progress has changed the way people get information. Gone is the time when a guy like Elton Brand had to ask a group of former classmates who his team just drafted.

I’m not saying things aren’t better now technologically in a lot of regards. I just think it’s a little sad that something like that will never happen again.

Unless, of course, some NBA player’s phone battery dies.

For better or for worse, the amount of access fans have has truly changed in big-time college basketball recruiting, and social media is a major reason why. In the past, high school stars were relatively shadowy figures. We rarely got to see them play, much less know very much about them before they showed up to be big little men on campus as freshmen.

But now? We’ve seen them play on YouTube, though it’s tough to draw conclusions since we likely only see the best the kid has, set to lousy hip-hop. We’ve read fervently on Twitter as they post important facts about their lives, like what cereal they prefer, when they’re studying for biology tests, and what songs they think are most noteworthy. We watch them make off-color jokes on a live stream and egg them on with a comment board. As always, progress is a double-edged sword. On the upside, it is empowering to be able to know ever more about the 16-year-old saviors of our favorite college basketball teams.

But on the downside, while the Lunatic Fringe formerly had to wait until the kid was out on the floor to let them know what they think of their mother and sister, they now have nearly direct access from adolescence. The meteoric rise of Twitter has given everyone with a computer and a fair amount of vitriol the ability to directly address young players who choose to use the 140-character juggernaut. With Facebook, they have room to be even more explicit. In the past, rabid – literally – fans had to resort to team message boards to spout their unhealthy disapproval of, well, everything. Unless recruits had a morbid fascination that I think only applies to the fans themselves, they didn’t subject themselves to reading it. But now you have situations such as that of Mr. Kyrie Irving, a top-flight point guard from New Jersey by way of St. Patrick’s in Elizabeth, who alienated tons of dozens of fans for the sole reason that he didn’t want to matriculate at their schools. Irving committed to Duke University on Thursday and is regarded as potentially the school’s best point guard prospect ever, very high praise indeed.  Never mind that Irving was limited to just one school and went with the one where he felt most comfortable. Picking a situation that didn’t correspond with the best interests of certain passionate Kentucky and Indiana fans made for a very distasteful backlash.

Irving runs a Twitter account which was followed by around 3,000 people, with likely most of them supporters of the schools which were recruiting him. I think he enjoyed the attention that he was getting – what high school kid wouldn’t? – and he almost certainly benefited in the selection process from hearing the selling points from fans of the schools he considered. He was also able to communicate with potential future teammates. But he saw the ugly side when he removed Indiana from his short list – leading him to respond… twice – and then when he “spurned” Kentucky to pick Duke. At both times, he was subjected to being called names that would make anyone’s mother blush. And they were able to send them directly to Irving with no filters to speak of. Irving, for his own part, used Twitter to help make his day in the sun a little brighter. From all accounts, he was likely certain he would attend Duke after his official visit several weeks ago. But he indicated that he would use Twitter to announce his choice, drumming up copious followers. He used the site to detail his subsequent official visits and demonstrate what appears to be a fantastic work ethic. He eventually chose to announce his destination with a news conference on ESPNU, which is fine – his hard work dictated that as a reward. Reports surfaced from time to time that called him a lock for Duke – correctly – and Irving actually took back his ability to make the announcement on his own by denouncing on Twitter that he had committed to Duke. Semantics dictate that Kyrie is technically accurate true, as he officially didn’t commit until his ESPNU presser.

So that’s the advantage. Twitter afforded the young man the ability to attract attention that he normally would not have been able to garner, and let him control his own announcement. In the past, a couple dozen hardcore aficionados would have heard of him. Now? At least 3,000, and then however many more watched his commitment conference. And make no mistake, every time he said something on his site, people overanalyzed it to death. The disadvantage is the unfettered access that allowed fans to voice their displeasure directly to him in quite colorful terms, even leading him at times to attempt to provide a lesson in morals to them. To Irving’s credit, he did not seem that adversely affected by the interaction. Now I can’t determine whether the positives of having the forum to self-promote outweighs the perils of letting idiots have a crack at you. But there’s no looking back. The days of word of mouth, and seeing a recruit for the first time when he steps on campus, are over. And though the enhanced access we experience is all in the name of progress, one has to think that just maybe, we were better off in a simpler time when we didn’t have the power to practically reach out and touch a recruit. Was it perhaps more satisfying learning about a player once he actually gets to campus? It just might turn out to be true that knowing everything isn’t the best thing.