The Sixers have no choice. They have to ride with Joel Embiid until his career here ends.

This was the afternoon of Sept. 15, 2016, and Brett Brown had, in his words, “left the gym an hour ago.”

The gym was the 76ers’ headquarters in Camden, which would not officially open for another eight days. But around the court, the place was humming. Charles Barkley, Billy Cunningham, and Jim O’Brien were watching a scrimmage from the sideline, and Brown could barely contain himself.

Now, finally, he could envision a chance to do what he hadn’t done for the three years since the Sixers hired him. Now, finally, he could envision coaching a competitive basketball team — because he could see all those players in front of him. Because he could see one player in particular. Because he could see Joel Embiid.

“On the court is Dario Šarić going up and down,” Brown said that day. “On the court is Ben Simmons going up and down, Joel Embiid, Jerami Grant, Hollis Thompson, Nik Stauskas, Jerryd Bayless, Gerald Henderson. You start counting names, and you’ve got Jahlil [Okafor] getting shots on the sideline. You have Sergio [Rodriguez], who brought his family in last night from Spain.

“Watching Joel, his path from back when to now, and seeing him get up and down the floor is beyond exciting. There’s a whole ‘nother vibe you feel brewing in the city.”

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Read those names again. None of them lasted. None of them stayed. Embiid stood out then, and he’s the last man standing now from those early, awful years of The Process — standing purely in the metaphoric sense, of course.

The sight of him crumbling to the court against the Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night, the revelation that he has a meniscus tear in his left knee, the mystery about when he’ll play again and how he’ll play once he returns — these developments are all familiar, and they are all exhausting, and they are exhausting precisely because they are so familiar.

The NBA trade deadline is less than a week away, and whatever pressure or urgency Daryl Morey might feel to make a deal that pushes the Sixers toward the top of the Eastern Conference has to be offset by a sense of resignation. Any move Morey makes, regardless of how brilliant it might be, could end up being nothing more than a half-measure. What will any deadline trade matter if Embiid still isn’t right? If he gets hurt again? What will it matter if the meal ticket can’t play or is a shell of himself when he does?

There are no good options for the Sixers here, for both the immediate future and the long term. They barely have any options at all. They cannot count on Embiid remaining healthy for an extended period of time. The evidence is in.

If it happens, it will be a minor miracle, as if someone spritzed his lower body with water from Lourdes. But they also cannot trade him. The notion is a complete nonstarter. When he is healthy, he is a remarkable player, and no NBA team can afford to trade away a remarkable player.

Even if they wanted to move on from him and start fresh with another rebuild — because that’s what it would be, a new Process — no team would be willing to give up a package of players and draft picks that would make such a deal worthwhile for the Sixers. No team would be willing to bet that Embiid would suddenly transform into the durable, night-after-night star he has never been here. The Sixers are stuck in a situation only Joseph Heller could love.

So where does that leave them? It leaves them wishing on a star, on the increasingly remote possibility that Embiid will stay healthy enough long enough to be at his best throughout a deep postseason run, that Morey will acquire just the right collection of supporting players, and that the Sixers will draw the right opponents and get the right breaks to win a championship.

That’s not much in the way of optimism, to be frank. This is a franchise that couldn’t break through the barrier of the second round even when Embiid was younger and flanked by more talented players. As he limped off the Chase Center floor the other night, a berth in the Eastern Conference finals, let alone an NBA title, never seemed further away.

In that way, the vibe brewing in the city is the same as it ever was, and the only choice that the Sixers and their fans have is to hope for the best for Joel Embiid, savor the moments of genuine greatness that he will yet provide, and ride out the rest of his star-crossed career, no matter how long it lasts.

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