LeBron may have chosen Miami to recreate high school. But he has no regrets.

Regrets? Nope.

LeBron James is chronicled in the latest issue of GQ, by author J.R. Moehringer, who had the seats closest to ringside for the circus that was the Summer of LeBron. He has a lot of insights, he tries to answer the hardest questions.

Like, what would LeBron change if he had it to do over?

“Nothing at all,” he said.

Like “Why Miami?”

Moehringer thinks because playing with Wade and Bosh in a fun city is a way to replicate James’ high school experience, which he still says is some of the best times of his life. Moehringer gets into this more in a companion interview done at TrueHoop.

I agree with Buzz [Bissinger, who wrote James’ last authorized book] that’s it’s dangerous to do pop psychologizing, but it seems to me that [James] has one formula for success in his life and that comes out of his high school experience...

He thrives, he’s happiest, he does his best when he is surrounded by friends. He just didn’t feel like that was happening in Cleveland. It seems pretty clear that Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh aren’t just the best talent he can surround himself with, but they’re a combination of talent and friends. He’s looking for camaraderie. That’s the formula that has worked for him -- and the only one that has worked for him.

Moehringer paints a complex portrait (which is not fully available online, you need to buy the magazine). He talks about a man somewhat isolated from reality -- a man surrounded by a layer of family, followed by a layer of friends, followed by a layer of Nike people. Moehringer said that in the room in Connecticut, where LeBron was to televise his decision, everyone had a sense of foreboding and that this was a bad idea -- everyone except LeBron and his people. They didn’t get it.

How isolated did he seem from reality at times? The opening of the article says it all:

He can imagine, he says, playing for Cleveland again one day.

Did I hear him right? Cleveland?

“If there was an opportunity for me to return,” he says, “and those fans welcome me back, that’d be a great story.”

Cleveland...Ohio? Where fans at this very moment are burning his jerseys? Where fans are selling toilet paper made from his jerseys?

“Maybe the ones burning my jersey,” he says, “were never LeBron fans anyway.”

This is a fantastic bit of writing, and like all great writing it ads nuance and shades of gray to what has been painted in black-and-white terms so many places. LeBron does not come off as a bad person or a stooge, he comes off as someone who thought it through and made his decision. Someone very comfortable with that decision.

He says that Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s post-decision rant only reinforced the feeling he made the right decision, as James himself said in GQ:

“I don’t think he ever cared about LeBron. My mother always told me: ‘You will see the light of people when they hit adversity. You’ll get a good sense of their character.’ Me and my family have seen the character of that man.” He went on to say that Gilbert’s post-Decision screed “made me feel more comfortable that I made the right decision.”

Moehringer doesn’t let we sports fans off the hook. We are to blame in part for this. Complain about ESPN’s “The Decision” all you want, large numbers tuned in to watch. As he gets into during his TrueHoop interview, Moehringer notes we complain about athletes acting narcissistically, then we tune in to watch them in big numbers. We are fascinated. We do it with Brett Favre. We do it with Tiger.

And when the ratings numbers start up again on Oct. 26, you can bet we will see record numbers tune in to watch LeBron again.