But if you still wonder if you should stop expecting anything more from your favorite team owner than to not have a franchise favorite dragged out of the arena in handcuffs, you can still remember Mike Ilitch fondly.

The former owner of the Tigers and Red Wings, whose public viewing was Wednesday at the downtown Detroit Fox Theatre that he brought back to life, treated legends much better than that.

Ilitch helped pay Rosa Parks’ rent in Detroit late in her life.

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When Ilitch died Friday, the story Ilitch never publicized, and which only was told by a third party only three years ago — long after Parks died in 2005 — was brought blooming back to life.

The original story was told in 2014 in the Sports Business Journal (owned by the company that previously owned Sporting News). 

Ilitch himself, though, never sought attention for it, by all accounts.

Michigan lieutenant-governor Brian Calley posted about it on Facebook last Saturday, to illustrate, he said, “the kind of man Mike Ilitch was.”

Parks, whose refusal to move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 was the catalyst for the Martin Luther King-led bus boycott that started the modern civil rights movement, had been robbed and beaten in her Detroit home in August 1994. She was 81 then, and the crime horrified much of the nation.

Ilitch contributed greatly to getting Parks set up in a new residence. He made arrangements to find her a safer place to live in the city, then was a major donor to a trust set up to pay her rent until she got settled. 

Few were aware of it until nearly a decade later — when federal judge Damon Keith, the trust fund’s executor, displayed one of Ilitch’s checks, calling it “symbolic of what he has always done for the people of our city."

In a statement, the Detroit-based Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development said: “We shall always be grateful that Mr. Illitch was one of the many respondents’ to Judge Damon Keith’s call for assistance to support Mrs. Rosa Parks, at a critical time in her journey.''

That’s part of a long list of generous deeds by Ilitch, including the restoration of the Fox Theatre, building Comerica Park to replace Tiger Stadium, giving the Big Three auto companies free ad space in the ballpark, renovating Joe Louis Arena for the Red Wings, building a new downtown arena for both the Wings and Pistons (to bring them in from the suburbs after nearly 40 years), and starting or contributing to charities all over the still-struggling city.

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Helping give Rosa Parks a safe place to live in her later years is hard to top, though.

And this is not to say either that Ilitch was the only obscenely-rich sports owner (the family net worth is reportedly $6.1 billion) to be this charitable, particularly away from the cameras … or that Dolan and Madison Square Garden are not generous, too.

Ilitch, however, never made a public fool of himself, trashed his enemies, capriciously made enemies or tried cheap ploys to insulate himself from condemnation. The degrading way Dolan co-opted other Knicks favorites like Latrell Sprewell and Bernard King in Sunday’s nationally-televised game comes to mind.

No commissioner ever had to come and stage an intervention with Ilitch to spare further embarrassment and condemnation for his franchise or the league, as Adam Silver had to do this week.

Losing teams are hard enough to swallow; the Tigers under Ilitch weren’t all that lovable during the lean years, for certain. But chronically boorish behavior is unforgivable. That’s not how Ilitch ever handled himself.

Detroit fans will be showing their love this week before Ilitch is laid to rest. An embrace that big from a city for a team owner is not the norm. Ilitch wasn’t the norm.

Thankfully, neither is Dolan.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The original version of this story said that Ilitch paid Parks’ rent for the remaining 11 years of her life. In fact, she resumed paying her own rent soon afterward, and later was allowed by the building owners to live rent-free. The story has been corrected to reflect the clarification.