DENVER — Michael Porter Jr. might be your Lex Luthor, but he’s Ashley Salvador’s Superman.

“I knew that it was probably coming because (the Nuggets) needed to kind of shake things up,” Salvado told me last Friday. “I was still sad when they announced it.”

MPJ officially became a member of the Nets last week. While you cheered, Salvador wept. The Nuggets got better. Her day got worse.

“Michael does no wrong in my eyes,” Salvador, a lifelong Denverite, continued. “When he got traded, I cried.”

You said good riddance to a bad contract. Ashley said farewell to a guy who showed up unannounced at her sick aunt’s house three years ago. Who sat down to watch a Nuggets game with Janice Jackson. His angel.

A guy who held that angel’s hand. Who humored her. Comforted her. Prayed with her. A guy who made a dying woman feel about 8 feet fall.

‘How do you like playing with The Joker?’

Legends are complicated. When Porter was dealt from the Nuggets to Brooklyn with a draft pick for Cam Johnson, Salvador felt a little part of her Aunt Janice traded, too. The part that always made her laugh.

“Oh my God, she was hilarious to watch the game with,” Salvador continued. “She got angry. She was happy. We’d start losing, and she’d be like, ‘I’m changing it.’ And then 2 seconds later, she’s like, ‘I can’t stop watching this.’

“The highs and the lows, it didn’t matter. She watched it no matter what. She did not miss a game.”

She sure as heck wasn’t going to miss the Nuggets’ visit to the Nets on Jan. 26, 2022, a makeup game in the Big Apple. Cirrhosis had sapped her strength, her appetite and her focus. It couldn’t kill her love for the Nuggets. Are you kidding? Jamal Murray shot arrow after arrow straight into her heart. She called Gary Harris “my baby.”

“My aunt loved the Nuggets more than the Broncos,” Salvador continued, “and that’s saying something.”

Even though it was colder than a witch’s kiss, the family scheduled a Nuggets-Nets watch party at Janice’s Barnum West home. She was fighting but fading, making every moment, every last game, a precious one.

Salvador picked up her brother Tim for the party. After setting his wheelchair inside her trunk compartment, she shut the door. A handle caught her windshield glass of her Mazda CX-5, shattering in the dead of winter. Not the best omen for the evening.

“It’s all right; it’s a windshield, we’ll replace it,” she told everybody. “Let’s go see Aunt Janice.”

About eight or nine loved ones were at the house, just before tip-off, when Salvador's cousin Nicole, made an announcement.

“I need everybody to put their phones in this basket,” Nicole said.

Eyebrows went up.

“We have a surprise,” Nicole pressed. “Put your phones in the basket.”

Salvador did. She remembers a big, shiny car pulling up. Then she remembers this giant figure walking into the house, then learning over to remove a pair of giant shoes.

She remembers Aunt Janice rising up from her chair, how the whites returned to tired eyes. She remembers a double-take that would’ve put Lou Costello to shame.

“MICHAEL?” Janice cried.

MPJ. In the flesh.

“You don’t understand how tall these guys are,” Ashley laughed, “until you see them.”

Turns out Janice’s granddaughter went to the University of Denver and knew Michael’s younger brother Coban. One of Jackson’s wishes was to meet a Nuggets player before she said goodbye. As her health turned for the worse, calls were made.

Which is the short version of how MPJ, who at that time was out for the season and rehabbing his back, became Salvador’s favorite Nugget.

“That,” Salvador recalled, “made her really happy.”

Porter walked in. He hugged Jackson. Shook her hand. Sat next to her all through the first quarter.

Janice? Janice was a kid again. Asking all the questions she had to know in the time she had left.

“How do you like playing with the Joker?” she wondered.

“I love playing with him. It’s unreal,” MPJ said. “His basketball IQ is on another level. But sometimes you kind of enjoy when he’s not on the floor because you get to do a little bit more of what you want.”

Porter laughed. Said with love.

MPJ signed a jersey. He posed for pictures. After about an hour, he had another appointment and excused himself. Yet as he was about to go, he had a question for Janice.

“Do you mind if I say a prayer for you?” Porter asked.

She most certainly did not.

“You go get better,” Janice told him, “so that way you can go win us a championship.”

“I’m going to try my hardest,” MPJ replied.

Salvador watched him drive off. Janice grinned. The Nuggets won, 124-118.

A month later, she was gone.

‘I just didn’t know that he was such a good person.’

Legacies are complicated. But MPJ was true to his word. The dragon that had found its feet for a blink in early 2021, right after Aaron Gordon came aboard, finally took flight in ’22-23.

A year after Aunt Janice passed, her Nuggets were invincible and inevitable. Denver posted a 16-4 mark through the spring of ’23, sweeping the Lakers, then stomping the Heat in The Finals to finally reach the NBA’s summit.

They don’t get there without Porter. Warts and all. The best relationships end with a ring.

“We took a chance,” Salvador said. “And I think that it was a chance well-take. Because I feel like he really did do great things.”

The Nuggets gambled on a lottery talent whose body was a lottery ticket. As a player, MPJ danced in Denver’s gray area, polarizing in ways that weren’t always his fault. If Playoff Jamal was an oven, Playoff Michael was a faucet, forever running hot or cold.

Yet unlike Murray, his availability — MPJ appeared in 81 of 82 regular-season games in ’23-24, then 77 of 82 in ’24-25 — improved. So did his defense.

“And his stats went up every year,” Salvador stressed. “Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, Porter this and Porter that.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, every year he has improved his game.'”

Janice is still there, of course. Still watching. Ashley has an urn of her ashes at home on a shelf. A picture of Jackson with Denver icon Chauncey Billups rests by the TV. Whenever the Nuggets game comes on, Salvador picks up her aunt’s remains and sets them next to the picture, next to Chauncey, closer to the action.

“He always talks about how spiritual he is,” Ashley said. “And (with) some people … you can brush that off. To actually witness it, you know how genuine it is. He’s not B.S.-ing. That’s who he is.

“When we drafted him, I was through the roof. I just knew that he was going to do good things for us. I just didn’t know that he was such a good person.”

Yes, his body sometimes failed him. True, when the shots didn’t fall, MPJ could disappear. But if a kid needed a kind word or an aunt needed a hug, the man rarely missed. You don’t always need a cape to become somebody’s hero.

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