Everything that happened ahead of Super Bowl LIX

In the dusty, crinkling California sunlight during the early 2000s, on the Centennial High School campus in Compton, Calif., an upperclassman sold a bootleg CD to a younger, eager rap fan.

The seller? Arron Afflalo, who would become an All-American basketball player at UCLA and play 11 seasons in the NBA.

The buyer? Kendrick Duckworth, who would later be known to the world as Kendrick Lamar, a singular presence in hip-hop who will headline the Super Bowl LIX halftime show in New Orleans on Sunday.

There’s no tectonic movement or sudden magic that announced this connection. Just a scribbled, clandestine entry into Compton’s rich folklore.

“If you wanted a CD, all my schoolmates came to me,” said Afflalo, who is two years older than the rap star and Pulitzer Prize winner. “I think I sold Kendrick either (Jay-Z’s) ‘Reasonable Doubt’ or a Hot Boys mixtape.”

A “Neighborhood Superstar” indeed, Kendrick Lamar ascends to football’s biggest stage Sunday at Caesars Superdome. His connection to the sports multiverse is long-standing and hyper-local. The Compton native hung out with the Los Angeles Rams during their 2016 training camp. He was courtside for Kobe Bryant’s 60-point send-off. He met Deyra Barrera, the mariachi singer featured throughout his latest album, “GNX,” during the World Series at Dodger Stadium.

Before all of that, he was viscerally inspired by the basketball players repping his city. It’s something he readily admitted on “Black Boy Fly,” a somber, deep cut from Lamar’s 2012 album “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City.”

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