How sad a thing must male friendship seem, held together as it so often is by professional sports. It’s a question worth considering as the Super Bowl bears down on us in all its feathered glory.

I haven’t watched football in years — too much cognitive dissonance — but fortunately, Northern Stage is raising the subjects of sports and male friendship in a production of “King James,” an adroit two-man show that tracks the camaraderie between two Cleveland Cavaliers fans through both the team’s ups and downs and their own.

This subject sounds light-hearted, and it is, but it’s also weightier than you’d expect. Under the direction of abigail jean-baptiste, who in 2023-24 was a resident director at Northern Stage, “King James” works its way through those heavier moments with energy and poise.

First produced in Chicago in 2022, Rajiv Joseph’s play follows the career of LeBron James, the titular king, whom some believe to be the greatest basketball player of all-time. (New England fans know it’s Bill Russell, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of Thursday night’s performance.)

James provides a timeline for the friendship between Matt, whose father has long had season tickets to the Cavaliers, the woebegone franchise that drafted James in 2003, and Shawn, who stops by the bar Matt works at hoping to buy the remaining tickets from James’ rookie season. Matt, who’s selling the tickets to try to offset a financial reversal, comes off as a bit of a sad sack, while Shawn is a budding writer who’s just sold his first short story and is working two other jobs to stay afloat.

The play, arranged like a basketball game into four quarters, gets off to a halting start, but that has more to do with the two awkward guys, still in their 20s by the looks of them, trying to make a deal. Thursday evening’s show was a preview, and Carol Dunne, Northern Stage’s artist director, reminded patrons that it served almost as a rehearsal, though the performance looked pretty polished to me.

Actors Darius Wright, as Shawn, and Andrew Gombas, as Matt, have a task to perform, taking their characters from callow youth to incipient middle age as the play follows them through James’ arrival in Cleveland as the Ohio native who’s come to rescue their team and city, his 2010 departure to Miami, his return to Cleveland in 2014, and the Cavaliers’ run to the NBA title in 2016.

Friendship among American men is a big topic these days, as is its flip-side, male loneliness. The idea that there’s a “crisis of masculinity” also seems widespread. It’s easy to see a crisis when the Proud Boys are marching in the streets, but most men are just out there living their lives and adapting as conditions change, and that’s how Matt and Shawn reach the audience.

Gombas, who’s appeared in “Sense and Sensibility” and “The Play That Goes Wrong” at Northern Stage, embodies Matt, who’s a bit of a clod, a guy who struggles to connect and who wavers between insecurity and bravado, with a kind of physical hollowness. I thought I detected traces of Midwestern nasal twang in his delivery, which made me wonder whether Dunne, who was in the acting company at The Cleveland Playhouse (or her husband, Peter Hackett, who was the Playhouse’s artistic director) offered some dialect coaching. Shawn is a striver, and Wright captures both his anxiety and his grit.

It’s worth noting that Matt is white and Shawn is Black, but race is only one of many factors in their friendship, and only fleetingly is it a point of conflict.

The production values around the two actors are admirably slick, most notably Chika Shimizu’s set design, which turns from a bar in the first half to a curiosity shop in the second, and the clever costuming of DeShon Elem, which alternates looks back and forth between the two characters. For the most part, the sound and lighting, by DJ Potts and Amina Alexander, respectively, are subdued, except for some convincing NBA-game-like effects. The soundtrack around the show furnished something I’d never have expected to hear in the Byrne Theatre, some unexpurgated hip-hop tracks. Cover those grade-school ears, high-strung parents! The show is probably best for teens or precocious tweens.

Insofar as “King James” is about sports, it runs deeper than I’d have imagined. (It also runs a bit longer, at about two hours and 10 minutes and a 15-minute half-time, which seems like the outer limit for a two-hander.) There’s a thread of loyalty that runs through the two men’s interactions and their fandom. The king of the title suggests a longing for divine experience, for truth and leadership, and for victory, however fleeting.

Early in the play, Shawn says he made “an oath to myself” to go to a Cavaliers game when he had enough money. Matt goes to games almost out of habit, or ritual. “I’m out on sports,” Matt says late in the play, but what he’s really saying is that he’s done with their hold on him. Following a team, and the daily work of living, are games of their own, and the two men play them as best they can.

If there’s a defining characteristic of men, it might be that they make promises, to themselves and to others, and then suffer to live up to them and to survive their failures. Friendship is a kind of promise, too, “King James” tells us, one that, at its best, helps men keep the other promises in their lives.

Northern Stage’s production of “King James” runs through Feb. 16. For tickets ($27-77) and more information go to northernstage.org or call 802-536-1769.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.