This comeback business is more complicated than it needs to be.

It won’t just be for the love of the game, even though that’s what Michael Jordan will say. Nor will his return to the Washington Wizards next fall be all about money, even though that’s what some people will say. It won’t be only about massaging egos or teaching kids how to play, either.

The simple truth is that Jordan will be back knees permitting because he hardly has a choice in the matter.

A man who learns to make decisions in mid-air is bound to be impulsive his whole life. Ever since Jordan’s first retirement, there have been times when playing was hard, but not playing was even harder. The rest of us spend more time worrying about his legacy than Jordan does. What worries him is how to fill up the next minute, the next hour, the next day.

The first time Jordan came back, it wasn’t simply to prove that nobody had driven him out, though it didn’t hurt his motivation. More likely, it was the same reason he risked coming back a second time last fall at age 38, when even the greatest athletes are over the hill.

It’s why Jordan will be ready to go again next fall. He still hasn’t found anything to do around the house or in a boardroom that fills up his nights and days the way life as an NBA icon does.

Right now, though, it’s impossible for Jordan to play and Washington coach Doug Collins, who’s known him going on 20 years, can only imagine how hard it must be for him to sit still.

Tuesday night, at halftime of what may turn out to be Jordan’s final game, the Lakers were already routing the Wizards. Collins went over to a ballplayer he’d seen drive himself through every obstacle imaginable on a basketball court and started talking to Jordan about conserving minutes and energy if Washington couldn’t dent Los Angeles’ lead by the middle of the third quarter.

For the first time in a long time, Jordan didn’t bother trying to wave him off.

“When Michael doesn’t fight you,” Collins marveled Tuesday night, “you know he’s hurt.”

An even sadder scene followed the next day, when Jordan limped away from his teammates and out the door of a Milwaukee hotel.

He was taking the first few steps on what should be a long and daunting recovery. But raising the ante has always been one sure way to get Jordan’s attention. Even the emotional stakes have been raised, Jordan said the other day, sounding wistful as he got ready to watch the Wizards try to complete the now improbable task of grabbing an Eastern Conference playoff berth without him.

“As a young kid, you take a lot of things for granted,” Jordan said. “You go out and you play because you’re young enough that you can deal with it and do it every single day. As you get older, when you know and you can sense that it’s coming to an end, you appreciate every moment.

“So every little thing in the locker room becomes monumental to you. I appreciate that a lot more now than I did when I was a young kid and everybody else was putting ice on their knees, and I was questioning them why they need ice.

“And now young kids are asking me why I’m putting so much ice on.”

Jordan yelled at the young Wizards plenty during games and on practice floors and he tried to set an example everywhere he went. How much of it sinks in depends entirely on whether the kids he played with, or against, were interested in learning. Still, try to find somebody who will argue that Washington the team and the city isn’t a little better off for the time Jordan put in there.

Or for the time he’ll be putting in there again next fall.

Why bother?

The truth is he cut some corners last time to make it back. He set goals for the kind of talent the Wizards would have to assemble before he’d return, then kept lowering them. And for all the pickup games Jordan played last summer, his diet and the rest of his conditioning program were not up to his usual standards.

He played anyway, and played well at times. Coming back, even at the level he just hobbled away from, is going to be hard. But by next summer, not playing is going to be harder.