And now: Jason Williams, the Hangover. There was never any doubt that the bill would come due. That first flush of fame is the most intoxicating thing in the world, and then you are famous, and then what?

This is what:

The word came from a control tower operator, radioed to the Kings' flight home after the overtime playoff loss in Utah on May 16 that ended Sacramento's season. The message was urgent, and so it was quickly relayed to Williams, the team's rookie point guard.

There was a family emergency, the message said. Someone was in trouble.

Details were sketchy; all that was known was that Williams needed to get to a telephone immediately. When he did, racing to the tower at Sacramento International Airport as soon as the team charter landed, the panicked West Virginia native learned why the details were so sketchy: There were none.

A family emergency? Not at all, now that you mention it. The call was a ruse designed to get Williams on the phone with a female admirer.

Welcome to the Show, kid.

They never tell you the part about what happens after you become a national commodity, but Jason Williams, 23, is in the grinding early stages of finding out. He also is about to learn some precious lessons in the fine art of dealing with his own fame.

And near the top, if not Lesson One itself, is that once the world starts watching you, it rarely stops.

Jason Williams is in the process of being watched and, like it or not, he'd better find a way to accommodate the reality. No one in the throng of fans who rushed the airport to greet the Kings that Sunday night, for example, had the slightest idea what had happened to Williams with the faux emergency moments earlier. They only knew what they saw, and what they saw was an obviously annoyed player pushing past his adoring constituency -- pushing profanely, according to several eyewitnesses -- and getting into his car and driving away with the windows rolled up.

The scene was chaotic from just about every angle -- players nearly unable to move in their cars because they were enveloped by well-wishers, some of whom were reluctant to let go of a player's hand once they'd gotten a chance to shake it. In retrospect, said Kings basketball chief Geoff Petrie, "It was a pretty uncontrolled situation."

"Hopefully," said Petrie, "we'll have some occasions in the future where we have a (celebratory) situation like this. . . . But we'll have to find a better way to handle it. Jason is not comfortable with crowds, and he needs to understand that some of that is going to come with the territory from now on."

It is unfamiliar territory, and perhaps only now is Williams beginning to grasp the dimensions of his fame. If there's a downside to being shown on ESPN every night, it is that every sports fan in America knows who you are.

Williams, in the words of one Kings official, is coming off a stretch of "some pretty weird fan instances." Once happy to sign autographs for the kids who knocked on the door of his house, he had to discontinue the practice because the knocking never stopped, and the kids starting looking awfully old. Despite living in a gated community, Williams has been awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of people standing outside his windows, screaming for his attention.

It's interesting: Williams' agent, Bill Pollak, lobbied hard for Sacramento as a destination prior to last summer's draft because he felt it was the right small-market fit for the kid from tiny Belle, W.Va. But Sacramento no longer is the NBA's hidden cousin, and that is in large part due to the fact that Jason Williams plays here.

So: Fame. The day after the airport incident, several patrons of a local McDonald's were astonished to see two Kings players, one of them Williams, sitting down for a meal. After waiting for Williams to finish, a fan approached for an autograph.

"I'm not Jason Williams," the young man replied.

There may be days when Williams wishes that were true. For the next several years, it won't be.