After Ian Mahinmi, of all people, hit a jumper to end the third quarter that all five Miami Heat players on the court were begging him to take, the Dallas Mavericks took a nine-point lead into the fourth quarter, putting them 12 minutes away from ending the most fascinating NBA season of my lifetime.

But even then, with just 12 minutes separating the Heat from an inglorious ending to what was supposed to be the season that kick-started a dynasty, you expected them to make a run. With LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, the Heat are more capable of scoring quickly than any team in the league, as they proved repeatedly by taking over the end of games repeatedly to beat the Celtics and Bulls on their way to the Finals.

But as the fourth quarter began to wind down, as Jason Terry and Dirk Nowitzki began making shot after shot, as the Mavericks kept finding a way to get a hand on loose balls, even if only to tip them out to one of their teammates on the perimeter, you slowly began to realize what was happening: the Miami Heat, in the biggest game of their season – and for most of the players involved, easily the biggest game of their entire lives – were quitting before our very eyes.

This became wildly apparent in the final minute of play when, after Wade bricked a 3-pointer to leave the Heat down by nine with 52 seconds to go, the Heat simply allowed the Mavericks to hold the ball until the shot clock had all but run out, before Jason Kidd hit a cutting Nowitzki for a layup to officially start the victory celebration with about 30 seconds left.

It was a stunning collapse for a team that had promised so much when it was created just 11 months earlier. When this Heat team was created last summer, it threatened to do a lot of things. Last July, in their ridiculous premature championship celebration in the very same arena where they gave up Sunday night, LeBron James said the Heat would win six titles. At Carmelo Anthony’s New York wedding later that month, he told Anthony and Chris Paul that the only way they’d be able to compete for a ring was to copy them, and bail from their current teams to play with Amar’e Stoudemire on the Knicks.

But once the season started, they kept proving all season long the thing that would prove to be their fatal flaw: they are front-runners. Sure, they may be the most talented front-runners the league has ever seen, but the label still fits. Before the Celtics foolishly dealt Kendrick Perkins and irreparably harmed their “Ubuntu” mantra, they easily dealt with the Heat three times. The Bulls beat them all three times in the regular season.

If Rajon Rondo hadn’t dislocated his elbow in the Eastern Conference semifinals, the Celtics may have managed to win that series anyway, even after the Perkins trade and the inevitable injuries to Shaquille O’Neal robbed them of the backbone of toughness they relied so heavily upon. If the Bulls hadn’t fallen apart down the stretch in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, had gone up 2-0 on the Heat heading back to Miami, who knows what would have happened in that series.

In both cases, though, the Heat managed to get ahead of both teams, and once they did, they never looked back. Then, in an odd way, the Heat made the same mistake in the fourth quarter Game 2 of the Finals, when Wade and James began shadowboxing in front of the Dallas bench after Wade’s corner 3-pointer with about eight minutes left put Miami up by 15, and seemingly in control of the series.

Only the Mavericks, a team full of outcasts and players whose careers were either forgotten or left for dead, weren’t going to go away quietly, or be intimidated by the talent and athleticism of the Heat, as the Celtics and Bulls clearly were. Instead, the Mavericks kept getting up, kept coming after these Heat. They kept testing the Heat’s three stars, kept making shots, kept hurling insults at them. The Mavericks were the first team that got up from the Heat’s first big punch, tapped gloves and fought back.

And, looking back on the series, you can see how it happened. What did Terry, Shawn Marion and DeShawn Stevenson have to lose? No one expected them to be there – as the Mavs kept reminding everyone, no one expected them to beat the Trail Blazers in the first round. Certainly no one expected them to beat these Heat, with their triumvirate of stars clearly too much for Nowitzki to take on alone.

Only he wasn’t alone; far from it, in fact. More important than being surrounded by star players, he was surrounded by players that weren’t afraid of the moment. Guys like Terry, who, like Nowitzki, was desperate to erase the haunting memories of watching this same Heat franchise celebrate on their home court five years earlier. Guys like Marion, who was thought to have nothing left, only to enjoy a renaissance this year, and especially during these playoffs. Guys like J.J. Barea, who became an unstoppable dynamo in these playoffs, who you could argue was the difference in the series; after he replaced Stevenson in the starting lineup prior to Game 4, the Mavericks never lost again.

As for the Heat, a team built with stars so, in theory, it wouldn’t need role players like Terry, Marion and Barea, they needed all three of their stars to step up when it mattered. But, in Game 6, none of them did. For the fifth straight game, James was mostly absent in the fourth quarter, while Wade was firing up one miss after another when he wasn’t turning the ball over, and Bosh seemed terrified to shoot the ball the few times he found it in his hands.

At the time, it was a shocking end for a team created with so much fanfare, so many self-imposed expectations. But it was that fanfare, those expectations that, in the end, is what did the Heat in. James, Wade and Bosh thought all they needed to do was step onto the court and their opponents would cede the title to them.

The scary thing is that it almost worked. Before the Finals, only the Philadelphia 76ers truly stood up to them, but the young Sixers simply didn’t have enough talent to knock off the Heat, no matter how hard they played.

Not only did the Mavericks have that toughness, they had the closer that the Heat’s other opponents lacked. Nowitzki is as clutch a player late in games as anyone in the league, and with his impossible-to-defend fadeaway jumpers, ability to get to the rim and never miss a foul shot, he’s an impossible matchup.

Nowitzki was terrible for those first 36 minutes last night, but down the stretch, he did what everyone expected he would – he carried those Mavericks over the finish line. He finished with 10 fourth quarter points Sunday night, giving him 62 for the series.

James and Wade combined for the same amount.

In a nutshell, that sums up the NBA Finals. In a series full of close games, the Mavericks had the resolve to make the plays they needed to down the stretch of games. When they fell behind, they had the ability, the will, the belief to rally back and make a game of it. When the Heat fell behind, they ceded the game.

“I just think this is a win for team basketball,” Dirk Nowitzki said afterwards, summing the situation up perfectly, wearing the baseball cap with “Champions” scrawled across the front of it that never quite fit right on his head. “This is a win for playing as a team on both ends of the floor, for sharing the ball, for passing the ball, and we’ve been doing that all season long.”

As if his play on the court didn’t sum up just how far LeBron James is from becoming an NBA champion, his comments afterwards made it crystal clear. When James was asked how he felt about so many people being happy he and his teammates lost, his answer was stunning in today’s politically correct society, where no one ever says anything inflammatory.

“Absolutely not,” he said, with a hint of a smirk crossing his lips. “Because, at the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today … they have the same personal problems they had today.

“I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family, and be happy about that. They can get a few days or a few months or whatever the case may be on being happy about not only myself, but the Miami Heat not accomplishing their goal, but they have to get back to real world at some point.”

And with that answer, LeBron James summed up why he’s in the position he’s in now, with the vast majority of the people not only happy that he and the Heat lost, but impossibly thrilled by it. Only someone that myopic, that convinced that the entire world revolves around his every move, could say something so shallow, so condescending, so callous. Only someone that self-centered could think it was a good idea to go on national television to announce to the world not that he is going to play for the Miami Heat, but that he is going to, “Take his talents to South Beach.”

Now with an NBA lockout looming, it could be a long, long time before we see LeBron James and that No. 6 Miami Heat jersey on a basketball court again. It will give him a lot of time to think about these last 11 months, to reflect back on the path he’s taken, to see how he’s landed in this position. But he won’t think that way. How could he? He’s got the life all of those miserable fans want, doesn’t he?

No, LeBron James will go home and drive his uber-expensive cars and fly around on his private jet and live his fabulous life. But what he won’t have is the championship that he was so sure he had already won when he signed up to become Wade’s sidekick last summer.

Like those miserable little fans at home who were happy about his team’s defeat, LeBron James will wake up every day for at least the next 12 months with the same problem that he’s had for his entire NBA career: he’ll still be waiting for his first NBA championship.