April has been a month of highs and lows in Phila.

It wasn't until this past week that I began to make some personal sense out of the opening lines of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

In the first few days of Philadelphia's April the lilacs blossomed blue and victorious with Villanova's thrilling national college basketball championship followed by a parade and celebration in Center City.

The very next day our April suddenly turned snow cold and drenching wet, almost in funereal anticipation of the death Monday of Ed Snider, the tough and passionate businessman whose gritty gap-toothed ice hockey team became the beloved emblem of a city's yearning for its sports teams to "go the distance."

Was it cruel poetry that Snider lived long enough to see his Philadelphia Flyers win their second-to-last game of the season last Saturday to earn an unlikely spot in the NHL playoffs?

And was that victory bittersweet when, after decades of Snider's efforts to grow the sport of youth ice hockey in African American neighborhoods, it was the Flyers' black Canadian winger, Wayne Simmonds, who scored twice, including the game-winning goal?

On April 13, Kobe Bryant, who joined the NBA straight out of Lower Merion High School, played his last game as a Los Angeles Laker, the only NBA team whose uniform he ever wore.

On April 4, Allen Iverson wore torn blue jeans to the news conference announcing his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame after a remarkable and contentious 14-year professional career that started and ended with the 76ers.

Two more different Philadelphia stories about basketball superstars could never be told. But each was laced with cruel arrogance and awesome selfishness that both defined and diminished the greatness each achieved.

In all the media discussion during Villanova's march to and through the 2016 NCAA Final Four, the ghosts of Rollie Massimino's 1985 national championship team clung like dryer lint to 'Nova coach Jay Wright's tailored suit jackets, invisible to the naked eye, and yet as obvious as a trash-talking parrot perched on the shoulder of a one-eyed pirate.

That impossible-to-live-up-to biblical story line, with Villanova cast in the role of the undersized David vs. Georgetown University's Patrick Ewing-led Goliath, was waiting to haunt the outcome of this 'Nova team's 2016 season in victory or defeat.

The way some college hoops fans too young to remember talked about that nationally televised game 31 years ago, you'd think that Villanova-Georgetown was a history lesson taught each year in Philadelphia schools. So vivid were the memories.

People tend to remember what they want to remember. It's the inertia of the human memory.

Six weeks after the glorious glow of a 1985 national championship, our TV screens were filled with a holocaust that killed five Philadelphia children held hostage by six suicidal adults.

On May 13, Philadelphia became a global symbol of an inept or criminally clueless city government led by authorities willing to drop a bomb on citizens in order to save a neighborhood that was destroyed by a fire in the process.

Sixty-one homes were destroyed, with 250 law-abiding neighbors losing their life's possessions. All the victims were black, as were the perpetrators.

The MOVE confrontation is the shame of a city that would rather you forget or never know that the cruelest month is not the one that fueled a poet's imagination.

Clark DeLeon writes regularly for Currents. deleonc88@aol.com