"Shehiye lecha rak tov, Miki" — may you have only good things, Miki. That was the headline a reader chose this week for a tribute published in Ynet's sport section, one of a flood of personal messages that have poured in for Miki Berkovich since his family revealed he is living with severe dementia.

The author recalled being a boy shooting hoops in the yard, narrating his own imaginary buzzer-beaters in the voice of broadcaster Rafi Ginat, always pretending to be Berkovich sinking the shot that won the game. It is a memory shared, in one form or another, by an entire generation of Israeli sports fans.

Berkovich, born in Kfar Saba in 1954, joined Maccabi Tel Aviv's youth ranks at 11 and made his senior debut at 17. He became the defining guard of the club's golden era, spending most of his career at Maccabi between 1971 and 1988 before later turns at Maccabi Rishon LeZion, Hapoel Jerusalem and Hapoel Tel Aviv, retiring in 1995.

He was central to Maccabi's breakthrough 1977 European Champions Cup triumph over Mobilgirgi Varese in Belgrade, a result still regarded as the birth of modern Israeli basketball's self-image, and added a second European crown in 1981 along with a FIBA Intercontinental Cup in 1980. Across his Maccabi years he collected 16 Israeli league titles and 13 State Cups.

With the national team, Berkovich was named MVP of EuroBasket 1979 as Israel reached the final and took silver, and he had won gold with Israel at the 1974 Asian Games. FIBA named him one of its 50 Greatest Players in 1991, and he was inducted into the organization's Hall of Fame in 2017. In 2024 he received the Israel Prize for outstanding sporting achievement.

That honor now sits alongside a far harder chapter. According to Ynetnews and other Israeli outlets, Berkovich's family disclosed this week — in a Channel 12 documentary about his life — that he has been coping with a complex medical condition, since reported as severe dementia, for roughly two and a half years. He is 72 and has, in recent months, been living at a care facility with full-time supervision.

Maccabi Tel Aviv chairman Shimon Mizrahi said signs of the illness had begun appearing around two years ago, though they were not outwardly apparent at the time. Berkovich's wife, Shelly, has been his closest support, alongside longtime friends including Tal Brody and figures from the Maccabi Tel Aviv family who came up through the club with him.

Doron Jamchi, one of the guards who followed in Berkovich's footsteps for club and country, put the grief plainly: his greatest pain, he said, was that after all the trophies and the records, Berkovich had reached an age when he should have been enjoying the best years of his life.

The reader tribute that prompted this piece closes with a line that has been echoed across social media and phone-in radio shows this week: "Thank you for unforgettable moments, thank you for the inspiration, thank you for teaching us never to give up." It is not an obituary — Berkovich is alive and, by his family's account, surrounded by people who love him — but it reads as Israeli basketball's collective way of saying goodbye to the man it knew, and thank you for everything he gave it.

For a country that measures its sporting self-confidence in large part through Maccabi Tel Aviv's European nights of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Berkovich was never just a player. He was proof, delivered shot after shot, that a small basketball nation could stand on the continent's biggest stage — and that legacy is what fans are now rushing to acknowledge while they still can.