Stephen Curry isn’t afraid to think and speak about the end, though the weight of it can be intimidating for all-time superstars — and though nobody gets to decide exactly how their final act happens or how the world will take it when it does.

The end is coming, whether in a few years or further down the road. Curry will walk away from his career, probably as a Warrior. He will go into the Hall of Fame, and he will look back at this period as his preparation for NBA mortality — and his last chance to achieve a few more monumental things.

Curry has been contemplating this for a while, so he has no problem talking about it now — even inviting the topic when we arranged this conversation a few weeks ago. He laughed when I said I wanted to start with his thoughts about Sunday’s All-Star Game at Chase Center.

“Is that all?” Curry said mischievously. “I’m sure you can come up with better questions than that.”

Well, also your entire career and how these later years are shaping up, I said.

“Oh, my life story,” Curry said, chuckling.

Good idea, but no, I’m not writing Curry’s life story. Many others will fill books and profiles on that grander theme; a few already have. This conversation is about this moment in time, placed in the context of everything Curry has accomplished, everything he still wants to do as a Warrior, the struggles to keep this going — and how all of this defines the rational and reasonable person he has always been.

And of course, a few weeks before he turns 37, in the middle of his 16th NBA season, this moment has to be about the work necessary to conjure the ending he wants, about dealing with imperfection, and about the pure hell of pushing back against the passage of time.

So, how do you see your career ending in the right way, Steph?

“Competitive,” Curry emphasized last week. “I’ve seen different scenarios. Like everybody talks about Kobe [Bryant] and his last years. From my vantage point, I’m comparing it to guys that only played for one franchise. Dirk [Nowitzki], Tim [Duncan], Kobe, from our era. … You don’t want to be in a situation the Lakers were in those last three years [with Bryant]. I know he came off the Achilles injury, but it was, like, they were a lottery team, and it was more just how many points can Kobe score down the stretch of his career. I don’t want to be in that scenario.

“My whole thing is, you have to be realistic. There’s probably not a move or a scenario where you’re gonna walk into a season or a playoff series as the perennial favorite. There’s just a lot of talent around the league. But to be competitive, where you have a chance — that’s what we want to see. I’m sure that’s what our fans want to see. Playing meaningful games, no matter how it ends. I think that’s what we deserve, and I hope that is the reality I get to live in this last part of my career.”

The end is coming. He’s not fighting it. But Curry isn’t going to let it happen quietly.

We sat down for the interview last week in Salt Lake City during the Warriors’ pre-All-Star-break road trip, which happened to be a day before the Jimmy Butler trade. In just two games since Butler’s arrival, the deal seems to have rerouted the Warriors’ season and reinvigorated Curry.

But Curry’s mood and words from before the trade are telling indicators of why the Warriors needed to do this deal — giving up Andrew Wiggins, three other players, and a protected first-round pick in the process. Curry wasn’t pressing management to do something radical. But he wanted the Warriors to make sure they tried. That’s patience combined with the subtle pressure of trust.

Butler’s arrival has given the Warriors a new sense of relevance and a proper star complement to Curry, who suddenly has a stress release and reason to believe. This probably won’t end with another title in June, but Curry, who on Monday played his 1,000th regular-season game, likely will play a hundred more meaningful games over the next few years. Maybe several hundred. The end is coming, but it just got delayed a bit.

And the timing is good. Curry is the unofficial host of All-Star Weekend — he’ll rush back from the Warriors’ game in Houston on Thursday to participate in many of the events starting Friday afternoon. It’ll be busy, he said, but it’s also a time to reflect on the work it took to get here, with four championships in this era and the financial wherewithal to help Joe Lacob and Peter Guber build Chase Center in the middle of it.

“Just a culmination of a lot of great years,” Curry said. “All that being on full display all weekend. So I’m excited about that.

“I don’t know what it’ll feel like. I said something before about I don’t want it to feel like a live-funeral type thing, like a celebration of what was and not what is and what’s coming. So you’ve gotta balance that, because we’ve still got some work to do.”

There’s more responsibility for Curry this week: Commissioner Adam Silver consulted with him to put together this new four-team format to try to juice up the competition from the dreadful levels of the last few years. Will it work? We’ll see. But it took a player as respected as Curry to instigate this kind of change. The only other at that level is LeBron James.

“I didn’t go in there thinking I was talking about the All-Star Game,” Curry said of stopping into Silver’s office for a chat last offseason. “I know because we were hosting, and because it was in the Bay, he wanted my input. But I wanted to talk about something else. And then that kind of came up as just to be like a sounding board. He didn’t have any ideas at the time. … My advice was: It’s not a bad thing to change it up entirely and try something new, knowing that you could always come back to the traditional format if whatever you decide doesn’t work.

“And then spitballing a bunch of different ideas to try to shorten the game a little bit. Create a different kind of scenario where you can try to inspire some competition. Obviously, it comes down to the players, whether you play or not. But I like where it’s at. It’s going to be different. It’s going to be critiqued. And that’s kind of what you want.”

Before Butler’s arrival and the current winning streak, the Warriors had gone 13-23 since late November, a run that clearly took a toll on Curry and seemed to put the dynastic run into the past tense. And nobody’s saying that the dynasty is revved back up again just because of two wins with Butler. There will be struggles ahead. The window is barely cracked open, if at all — Butler is 35, Draymond Green is 34, Klay Thompson is a Dallas Maverick, and it feels like the Warriors are a player or two short of true title contention.

But the struggling is an important part of this for Curry, the same way that the Warriors’ bleak circumstances back in 2009, when he was drafted, are a foundational part of this story. You get to treasure the victories especially when you’ve survived the failures.

Curry stayed with it back then, when he initially didn’t want to be drafted by the Warriors. A lot of good things happened because he did. He’s staying with it now.

“That’s the gas in the tank of why personally I want to only play for only one franchise and have made that a goal,” Curry said. “And why all my actions are kind of pointed toward that.”

There was a lot of reaction a few weeks ago when Curry and Steve Kerr both said the current moment wasn’t about panicking and making rash moves just to try to get a bit better. Were the Warriors throwing in their cards for this season and the rest of Curry’s tenure? No, they were not. Kerr and Curry were mostly saying the goal was to avoid impulsive moves for short-term gains that hurt the long-term goals.

The Butler trade seems to have split the difference. The Warriors have a better chance to do playoff damage this season, but they didn’t give away all future assets, and they have options this July and into the future.

I’m not sure if our conversation happened before or after Curry’s reported call with Kevin Durant. The Warriors essentially had a deal in place with Phoenix to acquire Durant but backed off after he told Curry he didn’t want another stint with the Warriors.

But you can hear some of that practical acceptance in his answer when I asked about rumors that the Warriors might be trying to acquire Durant or James or both.

“As you’ve seen recently, this league is crazy,” Curry said. “So you never say never. I think it’s funny now, because we have our Team USA picture, where all three of us [are together]. It’s nice for a nice headline. But again, I guess everything is possible and nothing is possible all at the same time in this league. I loved my experience playing with them, for sure. But this isn’t fantasy basketball, either. You kind of have to be reasonable.”

Reasonable? That’s not usually a characteristic of NBA stars — or any sports stars, really. They want things done right now, and if they don’t get what they want, they want out. And who dares turn them down? Butler just did all of that in Miami, though he professes great happiness now. And maybe Butler and the Warriors will be happy together for years to come.

But Curry has never done any of that. He’s proud of the way he has played out his career, but it has clearly taken a great deal of effort.

“I can’t think of anybody who could handle a situation like this with the dignity and grace that Steph has,” Kerr said. “But he also understands the responsibility that comes from if you want to be a Warrior for life, and that’s a big part of his goal for his career: He wants to be in one place, then it doesn’t come without some sacrifices.

“If he looked at this in a more transactional matter, maybe he’d be asking those guys to do stuff or maybe he’d be asking for a trade. But he understands the value of the relationship and being in one place forever. He watched Kobe do it and Tim Duncan and Reggie Miller. There’s a lot of gratification and meaning in that.”

All of this has produced an even closer bond between Kerr and Curry, especially after other main figures from the dynasty have departed. They can lean on each other based on all these seasons together and the tougher times they’ve experienced. They’re in this end stage together and could depart together.

“With experience, obviously, there’s a level of trust that’s built and continues to deepen over the last 10 years,” Curry said of his relationship with Kerr. “I think we’ve had more conversations this year and probably last year than we’ve ever had in-season.

“We’re being challenged in new ways, for sure. And I think that’s brought out a little bit more of that need for communication. … He broke a clipboard last night. I’ve been waiting on that, ’cause I need it, I like to see that fire … but it’s gotten harder, and you have to kind of accept that.”

Upon his hiring in 2014, Kerr was open about the fact that he took the job largely because he wanted to coach Curry. More than a decade later, he’s still coaching this team because of what they’ve accomplished together and because Curry doesn’t want anybody else in this spot.

“It means everything to me — my relationship with Steph is one of the best parts of this job,” Kerr said. “I don’t think we ever had to discuss things like this in the past, so because we didn’t have to, we weren’t sort of putting our heads together very often. Still had a great relationship, but we didn’t have to get into stuff like this.

“It’s changed this year in that regard — last couple of years, probably. We share a common goal, and that’s to finish this thing really well, both for Steph and for the organization.”

Many people have been huge parts of this — from Lacob and Guber to Jerry West to Myers to Mike Dunleavy Jr. to Draymond, Klay, Andre Iguodala, Durant, and of course, Kerr.

Curry chuckled when I asked if there was an under-recognized member of this journey he’d like to highlight. There is no such thing as under-recognition for anybody associated with a team followed as passionately as the Warriors, he said. But he’ll make sure to mention everybody at a very important moment.

“From my vantage point, I might have the longest Hall of Fame speech ever, because there are so many people that you realize are impactful in this situation to have success for this long,” Curry said.

Yes, that sounds like his 30-minute speech to accept his first MVP trophy in 2015, which came between Games 1 and 2 against Memphis in the Western Conference semifinals and included comments thanking every single one of his teammates, who were all seated onstage behind him.

“Yeah, we definitely lost Game 2 because of my speech,” Curry said with a laugh. “It was entirely too long after practice. But never thought I’d be back up there. I shortened it Year 2 for sure.”

This is still about the end. Curry has endured plenty of heart-tugging endings, watching Andre Iguodala exit, then come back, and exit again; seeing Bob Myers leave; and, of course, gutting through Klay Thompson’s emotional departure last offseason.

Curry was the first one here, arriving more than a year before Lacob and Guber bought the team. Other than the owners, he’s probably going to be the last member of the dynasty standing, and he’ll continue to say goodbyes along the way. Then he’ll have his own.

“You think about that more and more,” Curry said. “I’m not at the farewell yet. That’s just part of time. If you’re fighting human nature or fighting the inevitable in that, then … I don’t think you’re handling it right. Because you need a little bit of fear of what’s coming, what an end might look like, to inform decisions that you’re making now and appreciate what’s going on right now.”

I’ve joked with Curry in the past, and mentioned to him again, that Warriors fans seem to be agonizing about trying to maximize his final prime years more than he is. But the look he gave me was evidence that —wait — he does agonize about this. In his own way.

“I don’t need to broadcast everything that I talk about or what I feel in the sense of what input I’m giving the front office,” Curry said. “That’s not the way I go about it. So you hear all that stuff, which is why I said you’d be insane to think that I’m OK being average on an average team and not try to do everything you can to fix that.

“No matter how it plays out, I make decisions that I feel like are the best for me, as well.”

Curry didn’t mean that as any kind of threat, because he doesn’t do threats. It was common sense. It was reasonable. He loves being a Warrior, and it’s extremely likely that he will retire as a Warrior and continue to be part of this franchise for many decades. But it’s not a one-way relationship. What the Warriors owe Curry is in the multitudes. They’ve largely honored that, and they honored it again with the trade they just made. Curry and the Warriors have made themselves meaningful for 16 seasons, and that should continue past the end of his career and well beyond. If everybody understands this, it may last forever.