For a decade, Terance Mann knew Rajon Rondo only in 2-D form.
Mann was a middle-schooler in Lowell, Mass., when a friend gave him the rookie card of the Boston Celtics’ young point guard. The gift might have settled at the bottom of a desk drawer, lost amid teenage mementos but for its timing: Mann happened to receive it the same day he made the Lowell Travel A Team, the very roster he’d been cut from a year earlier. It felt like an omen. As Mann improved, moving from Florida State to the Clippers in the 2019 draft, the card stayed tucked inside his wallet for good luck.