GREATNESS PROVED, GOODNESS IS NEXT.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

In Kobe Bryant's increasingly sensational biography, Wednesday goes down as the night the Lakers guard's life spun wildly into control. With the sudden dismissal of a rape charge in Colorado, he has been freed to consolidate his many gains of the summer.

Bryant has his life back. Now he'll see how big a blessing that turns out to be.

At age 26, an NBA player for eight years already and as big a basketball star as anybody but (ahem) Shaquille O'Neal, Bryant must feel for the first time that he's completely in charge of his life on and off the Staples Center court.

The news that prosecutors have dropped the felony rape case, saying the beleaguered accuser no longer wanted to take part in the trial scheduled to open next week, is only the latest and greatest thing to go Bryant's way in the offseason since the Lakers' NBA Finals loss to Detroit.

O'Neal, whose presence helped Bryant to become a champion three times over but also cramped his style, was traded away by the Lakers to the Miami Heat. Phil Jackson, the coach whose concepts made the O'Neal-Bryant combination work but also annoyed both players, was told he would not be given a new contract. The team offered Jackson's job to Mike Krzyzewski, and although Bryant's favorite college coach turned it down, the episode confirmed Bryant's power. After making the franchise sweat for months, Bryant signed a new contract July 15 that's worth $136.4 million over seven years.

None of which would have been worth a prison-yard cigarette if the case in Eagle, Colo., had gone to trial and the jury had said, ``Guilty.''

But that threat has gone the way of O'Neal and Jackson and the weight of free agency.

So the ball is in Bryant's hands, just the way he has always liked it, and instead of the clock winding down, time and opportunity stretch ahead of him.

All he has to do now to make absolutely everything all right is virtually single-handedly win the Lakers an NBA title.

Out of the fire and into the frying pan?

Things were, in a sense, simpler for Bryant when all he had to worry about was whether his attorneys could fend off a rape prosecution. Starting today he goes back to the less cut-and-dried matters of whether Kobe Bryant is a one-of-a-kind talent or a Michael Jordan wannabe, a championship-team leader or a lucky Shaq sidekick, good teammate or a selfish showboat, a sweet kid or a media manipulator.

Bryant has inspired stronger devil-or-angel emotions from his team's fans - on both sides of the argument - than any other L.A. athlete in memory. Those emotions have intensified since he was perceived to have plotted the departures of O'Neal and Jackson.

The price of the freedom he has achieved this summer is that it now is entirely up to him to win admiration commensurate with his talent.

I'm not talking, by the way, about the speculation on whether Kobe can reclaim his place as one of the nation's leading celebrity-athlete product endorsers. That's a question for people who like to sound smart by cynically reducing every issue to boring dollars and cents. Who in the world really cares about a multimillionaire's prospects for employment as a McDonald's pitch man?

I am talking about whether, having left Colorado as an officially ``innocent'' man, Kobe can convince Los Angeles that he's a good man.

Not that the past year will ever completely go away. The prosecutor spent much of his statement to reporters Wednesday saying in various ways that Bryant would have been proven guilty had the case gone to trial and the ``victim'' been willing to testify. Eagle County district attorney Mark Hurlbert sounded as if he'll keep impugning Bryant all the way to the grave rather than admit he was flogging a hopelessly flawed case.

Without a trial in which to try to shoot down the accusations, Bryant will remain under the suspicion that he is just another celebrity athlete able to buy lawyers clever enough to cheat justice.

But neither unofficial condemnations nor the possibility of a civil case being waged by the accuser will keep Bryant from playing for the Lakers and trying to live up to the influence and the contract owner Jerry Buss has given to him.

That trial, otherwise known as the NBA season, begins for Kobe Bryant on Nov. 2.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) District Attorney Mark Hurlbert, right, and other Eagle, Colo., officials leave after announcing the case against Kobe Bryant has been dismissed.

(2) Kobe Bryant talks to his attorney, Pamela Mackey, Wednesday. Bryant's case was dismissed later in the day by the Eagle, Colo., prosecutors.

M. Spencer Green/Associated Press