Like death and taxes, A’ja Wilson winning the WNBA’s Most Valuable Player award is quickly becoming one of life’s certainties.

The Las Vegas Aces center claimed her third consecutive nod (and fifth in her career) on Thursday, after leading her Aces to their eighth straight playoff appearance with averages of 26.0 points and 9.4 rebounds. She scored at a near-career-high 62.5% True Shooting clip and blocked at least 2.0 opposing shots per game for the fourth consecutive season. Wilson was, once again, the best statistical player in the league by a wide margin, making her selection for the award something of a foregone conclusion as the regular season was wrapping up.

Needless to say, five MVPs is a lot. No other player in WNBA history has won the award more than three times — accomplished by Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie and Lauren Jackson. Wilson has now personally won about 17% of all MVPs awarded in the entire three-decade history of the W.

If we zoom out and compare Wilson’s MVP feats with those from other leagues, she has joined some pretty special company. Only eight players in the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL and WNBA have won five or more MVPs in their careers — and it’s a who’s who of all-time sports legends:

The list of three consecutive MVP winners is roughly as exclusive and contains some additional greats — names such as Larry Bird, Wilt Chamberlain, Shohei Ohtani, Bobby Orr and Brett Favre:

And Wilson’s most exclusive club of all doesn’t even necessarily involve a streak but rather a set of MVPs won in a specific period. In all of major North American pro sports history, only six players — including Wilson, now — have won at least four MVPs in a five-year span. And they’re basically all serious GOAT candidates:

It’s extremely difficult to stay at the absolute pinnacle of a sport for such a sustained period, due to reasons ranging from one’s own performance and health, external factors like voter fatigue, and the emergence of other, younger challengers to the throne. (Just ask Nikola Jokić, who won three NBA MVPs in four years but saw his place at the top usurped by Shai Gilgeous-Alexander each of the past two seasons.)

There’s even the matter of narrative and expectation. The trouble with setting the bar as high as Wilson has is that it stays there for future seasons, forcing you to play even better the next year just to keep from losing ground. Your own present greatness can become a liability for your MVP chances in the future.

But Wilson keeps outrunning that potential pitfall — and all the rest — by simply playing better than everyone else. She led the WNBA in LAKER Wins Added by a full win over No. 2 Veronica Burton, and the margin was even greater in other statistics such as Win Shares. While it’s easy for even GOAT-level players to let the MVP narrative spiral away from them when another candidate sticks close in those leaderboards on a team with a more interesting story, Wilson’s antidote seems to be to not let anyone else get close enough to even entertain that conversation.

The closest that might have come to happening during Wilson’s streak was last season, when Napheesa Collier and the Minnesota Lynx had dream seasons that fed into the player’s and team’s case as the best in the sport. For much of the season, Collier’s performance — and the “M-V-Phee” narrative — had Minnesota’s star in the award’s driver’s seat. But a late-season injury to Collier combined with a stretch-run heater for Wilson to flip the MVP race around and earn her hardware in the end. Collier had a year that would have been MVP-worthy most seasons. But Wilson had one of the greatest individual seasons ever, and it was not to be denied.

Nor was she to be denied this season. And the amazing thing is that Wilson only turned 30 in the middle of the season: Basketball-Reference actually lists this as her age-29 season because that’s how old she was on July 1. Only two other athletes in our sample of major pro sports — Wayne Gretzky and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — are in the same club as Wilson, winning at least five MVP awards through their age-29 season:

Obviously, that means Wilson could get plenty more chances to add even more hardware to her trophy case by the time her career comes to an end.

Of course, this is not always guaranteed: Though no one would have guessed it at the time, Gretzky’s ninth Hart Trophy win, at age 28 in 1989, ended up being his last. For his part, Abdul-Jabbar had one MVP left in the tank after winning his fifth at age 29 in 1977; he also won in 1980, at age 32. These runs of dominance can disappear quickly when they finally do reach their expiration date.

So even as Wilson dominates the WNBA’s award landscape year after year, we shouldn’t take for granted what she is doing — even if it does now feel like one of the few things we can count on in life.