He was booed when he came to Utah. He left the same way.

In between, for a few gloriously average seasons, the rising basketball commodity that is Gordon Hayward developed into a beloved sports figure in this state.

But in the end he, too, suffered the same fate as others who’ve chosen somewhere else — anywhere else, really — over Utah: Just another in a long history of promising millionaires who don’t want to play professional basketball in this market.

RELATED: Gordon Hayward chooses Celtics over Jazz, Heat

On Independence Day, after seven NBA seasons with the Utah Jazz, the team’s franchise player exercised his free agency to spurn the only professional team he’s ever known and sign with the Boston Celtics.

For Jazz fans it was — forgive the mixing of sports metaphors here — nothing short of taking a line drive to the groin. Their team had made big plans around the small forward, sensing that he might just be the guy to bring back the salad days of Stockton and Malone. But in the end, once his lucrative contractual obligations to the Miller family were fulfilled, Hayward chose to bolt for the Kelly green uniform of the Celtics and his old college coach, Brad Stevens. 

He may as well have gone to the Middle East and joined up with ISIS. Or moved to Colorado and became a liberal Democrat.

Because Gordon Hayward is now dead to us.

Meanwhile, in Boston, condescending fans there seem genuinely amused that their counterparts in Utah would spend so much time whining about losing their All-Star player. To which we say: “Oh really, Beantown? Babe Ruth much?”

RELATED: A look inside the process that sent Gordon Hayward to Boston

Everybody keeps trying to say Hayward’s actions are nothing personal, that it’s just business.

But it is personal, and the NBA knows it’s supposed to be. Because on game nights, when the Utah Jazz are in a nail-biter and the team’s jumbotron is trying to whip the crowd into an opponent-rattling frenzy, it’s not done by reminding fans that winning this particular game will be good for the company’s bottom line.

Rather, it’s done by appealing to our emotions — reminding us that we are family, and that nobody comes into our house and desecrates the sacredness of a building whose naming rights have gone to the highest bidder.

And then we wonder why fans can’t view Hayward’s move with the same cold, calculating detachment of a sports agent?

This is not to say Hayward gets a pass. To hear some talk, he hamstrung the Jazz by waiting so long to make — or at least announce — his decision. And although the Jazz were dangling the most financially lucrative salary in front of Hayward, in the end the bright lights of the big city and a coach’s friendship won out.

So much for it being “just business.”

Of course, fans are just as fickle as players. Indeed, I’ll wager that some of the most passionate, wear-their-hearts-on-their-sleeves Jazz fans who are now busting Hayward’s basketballs for dumping Utah were among those who booed the loudest when he was picked ninth overall in the 2010 draft.

At the time Utah drafted Hayward, the Jazz’s Kevin O’Connor quipped, “They told me they booed John Stockton too, so we’ll hope that history repeats itself.”

It almost did.

Still, it’s hard not to feel rejected — although it’s certainly not, like, Derek-Harper-level rejection. Harper once answered talk of being traded to the Jazz by telling ESPN, “There was a Utah deal, but you go live in Utah. Nothing against Utah or their team, but I don’t want to live there.”

Keep in mind, at the time Harper was playing for the Dallas Mavericks and hoping to move to the Houston Rockets — both of those teams being in Texas.

And the guy was disrespecting The Beehive State?

Hayward had every right to leave Utah, just as Jazz fans are perfectly within their rights to boo that decision for years to come. But in the end, No. 20’s only real crime — near as I can tell — is that he just doesn’t feel about the Utah Jazz the way you and I feel about the Utah Jazz.

In breaking the news that broke our hearts, Hayward said he wanted to make sure he got it right. He didn’t.

But then, he couldn’t possibly have gotten it right. Because any way you look at it, if the headline was “I’m leaving,” Hayward was going to leave Utah fans feeling hurt, angry and betrayed.

There’s a great song by singer-songwriter Jill Sobule that sums up quite nicely the relationship between Gordon Hayward and the Utah Jazz. In “Love Is Never Equal,” Sobule reveals the great eternal truth that “Someone always loves more than the other.” The last few lines of her song explain:

”Love is never equal/ The love between two people/ Someone always gets kicked to the curb/ Someone’s always left out freezing/ Battered down and bleeding/ Love is never equal after all/ Someone’s always cheated/ Hoodwinked and mistreated/ Love is never equal after all.”

Someone.

And once again, that someone turns out to be the Utah Jazz.

Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/MarkSaal.