It was Donovan Mitchell's's night. Of course it was. For the past month, basically every night has been Donovan Mitchell's night.

Mitchell won the 2018 NBA Slam Dunk contest Saturday in emphatic fashion, putting the icing on the cake of a month that saw the Jazz win 11 straight games, which helped catapult Mitchell to the forefront of the Rookie of the Year race. He scored 40 points against the Suns while shooting 70 percent from the field, and followed that up with a huge fourth quarter to beat the Spurs. Now he's won the dunk contest he's dreamed of since he was a little kid.

There's no getting around it. At 21, Donovan Mitchell is officially a star. 

"A whirlwind," Mitchell said after Saturday's dunk contest. "Honestly, this has been a fun month."

In his characteristically humble manner, Mitchell then launched into a diatribe about how well Ricky Rubio has been playing and how his teammates are trusting each other and staying even-keel despite the winning streak. But at the end of his answer he paused, smiled and, in a brief, genuine moment of reflection, uttered:

"Yeah, this month has been insane."

The dunk contest itself was a perfect microcosm of Mitchell's recent NBA rise. He had explosive moments of jaw-dropping brilliance, but his consistency ultimately led to his success. While others attempted incredible feats of athleticism and missed, Mitchell stuck with the dunk contest script that he says he's been planning his whole life.

"Believe it or not, I've been preparing for this since I was a kid, you know, like what am I going to do?" Mitchell said. "But I didn't know I'd be able to jump this high, so I kind of added a few more tricks."

Mitchell set the tone with the first dunk of the competition on Saturday, throwing an alley-oop to himself using the backboard of a second basket. It's a dunk he's been doing since high school, usually using the back wall of the gym instead of another hoop.

But the dunk that won Mitchell the contest, the Vince Carter reverse 360, is one that Mitchell wasn't confident about heading into the finals.

"Actually, funny story is, I haven't made that dunk in like half a year," Mitchell said. "I tried it in practice the past two days and tried it this morning -- didn't make it. Tried it last night, didn't make it. So to be able to make it was why I was so excited."

The athleticism he displayed in the dunk contest is just one reason why people are around the NBA are excited about Mitchell. He's averaged 22 points per game since Jan. 1, and is rapidly gaining on 76ers phenom Ben Simmons as the front-runner for Rookie of the Year as the Jazz have thrust themselves into the playoff race. Some even say that Mitchell's already passed Simmons.

"His game is similar to the kind of game I play," All-Star Damian Lillard said earlier on Saturday, after proclaiming Mitchell as his pick for Rookie of the Year so far. "Being in the Western Conference, how he's not shy, you know, leading the team. Nights where he misses a lot of shots, he just keeps playing. When the game is on the line, he has confidence to make the plays that the team needs to be made to win games. You've got guys that have been in the league a lot longer than him that don't even have the balls to do some of the stuff that he's doing."

Despite the high praise from league superstars like Lillard as well as Chris Paul and Paul George (who together convinced Mitchell to enter the draft after seeing him work out last year), and despite the fact that he cemented his status as one of the league's brightest young stars with his dunk contest win on Saturday, Mitchell knows how fleeting success can be in the NBA.

"You look at injuries that happened this whole year, this could be taken away in a matter of seconds," Mitchell said. "You could have a great day and then it could be taken away. So you've got to approach it every day like this is your last day. You've got to go out there and just work your butt off because this isn't promised."

In order to extend his career, he remembers to do something that he says most young players forget to do: listen.

"If you continue to learn, learning is underrated for kids nowadays," Mitchell said. "Kids don't like to learn. They like to just do, and that's when mistakes come. Just starting to learn and being able to understand that that's part of the process."

Now that he's a bona fide star, it's scary to think how high Mitchell can rise as he continues to learn and grow.