Gates delivers the final piece of dialogue in “Hoop Dreams,” and it is a powerful epitaph: “When somebody said, ‘When you get to the NBA, don’t forget about me,’ I should have said, ‘If I don’t make it, don’t forget about me.’ ” Gates never got to the NBA, and in some ways he has been forgotten, but he made peace with all of that long ago. “I never felt like I needed to be a superstar,” he says. “Curtis said in the movie, ‘I’m used to everybody loving Curtis Gates, but now I’m just a regular guy.’ But he didn’t mind going to work anywhere, and I never did either. I always thought being a regular old guy was what was in store for me.”