It’s risky to write a column on a deadline about a story that’s clearly still developing. As I’ve discovered a few too many times, it can be easy to look really foolish in retrospect after your predictions are totally contradicted by reality or else rendered completely irrelevant by unforeseen events.

So please understand that when I write this column about the absolutely devastating nature of Baron Davis’ departure from the Bay Area sports scene, I do so assuming a few things: that Gilbert Arenas will re-sign with the Wizards and not rejoin the Golden State Warriors, that Elton Brand will decide to follow through on his end of the Davis defection and re-up with the Clippers to play alongside Baron and that no other true superstar suddenly emerges onto the free agency and/or trade scene who wants to take the Warriors’ money.

But if you take those factors as a given (and I for one think you pretty much should at this point), then you have to understand that independent of how much Baron actually has left in the proverbial tank, his departure is yet another blow to a sports market that is practically hemorrhaging star power.

There was a time, once, when the Bay Area was the home to plenty of sports megastars, and why not? As one of the biggest markets in the country, it’s only natural that some of the nation’s biggest athletic stars would be willing to play in front of a huge audience, but lately that dynamic seems to be shifting.

The 49ers have fallen from being a perennial contender to a league doormat. The Raiders? Maybe worse. The Giants have fallen completely off the map since the departure of Bonds while the A’s continue to compete with a roster devoid of any big names and the Sharks play in a sport no one watches (unless they have a cable network most have never heard of). Even the occasional competitive blip from Stanford or Cal on the college scene rarely seems to make a dent on the national attention span.

But the Warriors? For a brief moment, they were different. They were a collection of misfits, castaways and unprovens — the injury-prone veterans and untested youth. And they just played different . Don Nelson’s helter-skelter, chaotic approach went even a step beyond the dynamic offensive scheme of the Phoenix Suns. The motto was run, score and run some more.

And then there were the 2007 playoffs. Never has there been a more impressive run to just the second round of the NBA postseason, as the Warriors captured the attention of the nation with their upset of the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks — the first upset of a top seed in the first round in a seven-game series in NBA history.

In part, it was the personalities involved. Dirk Nowitzki having just been named the NBA MVP before suddenly looking positively soft against Golden State gave the Warriors a measure of pluck. So too did the less-than-friendly relationship between Warriors coach Don Nelson and his old boss, Mark Cuban. So too did Stephen Jackson’s reemergence as a basketball player, rather than a brawler. The sea of yellow “We Believe” t-shirts and the rollicking atmosphere at Oracle Arena didn’t hurt either.

But it was, perhaps, Baron’s emergence as a bonafide superstar that gave the Warriors’ postseason run its true panache. There was no doubt that he was the face of the franchise, and no doubt about how much fun he was having, proving to the world that yes, he really is that good. The kind of good that is purely unstoppable when it wants to be.

That momentum carried forward into the next series, as Davis’ dunk over Utah’s Andrei Kirilenko was one of the most memorable dunks in recent years. And the image that will forever stick in the minds of NBA fans who watched that postseason is of an upstart, rebellious group of slashing, exciting scorers, led by their dynamic, bearded captain, who finally became the star he was meant to be as all the stars aligned for Golden State to topple a Dallas giant.

Flash forward to now — to a Bay Area sports scene that has lost the Lopez twins, lost Bonds a year ago, lost any football relevance half a decade ago and now has lost Baron.

If things don’t start looking up soon, there could be an awful lot of local fans who could find themselves glued to their computers and televisions, looking for a glimpse back to the spring of 2007, when for a brief moment, Bay Area sports mattered. So perhaps, in reality, Davis hasn’t gone too far after all. Geographically he may have flown to SoCal, but the memories of local diehards can’t and won’t let the Baron era fade away.