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.

But no one – and I mean no one – could ever have hoped, or even dreamed, that the final chapters of this story would play out quite like this.

There will be other players that go down in history as being better than LeBron James. He sealed that fate for himself, lost any chance he had to lay claim to the “Greatest Of All Time” moniker when he chose to, as he put it, “Take his talents to South Beach” and join Dwayne Wade’s team, instead of going out and beating him – and everyone else – on the court. But you can make a strong case that James is the most compelling player the league has ever seen.

Until this season, he was at least everyone’s second-favorite player, if not their favorite. I don’t know anyone who didn’t like him before the events of last July ran their course. They all loved the way he played as much as the off-court persona he had created and honed to perfection. Here he was, the hometown kid, trying to lift lowly, forgotten Cleveland – the city that could never get out of its own way when it came to its sports teams – to a championship. And the way he did it, with the ball-handling skills of Jason Kidd combined with the body of Karl Malone, allowed him to do things that have never been seen on a basketball court.

But then last summer happened and, suddenly, everything changed. Outside of the peninsula of South Florida, fans around the country turned on James en masse. The man who once was cheered voraciously wherever he went instead found every opposing arena turned into a scorpion’s lair when he and the Heat came to town. Casual fans, or even people who weren’t fans of the league at all, took glee whenever the Heat lost, and were at least disappointed, if not saddened, whenever they won.

After some initial struggles, the Heat began to figure things out, to slowly, but surely, find a rhythm. They didn’t win 70 games, as some had claimed they would, but they did wind up with the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference by the end of the regular season. At that point, people were sure the Heat would lose to either the Celtics or the Bulls, were sure that they wouldn’t make it out of the Eastern Conference, were sure that this conglomerate of star power wouldn’t be rewarded so quickly. People felt especially confident about that after the Heat struggled mightily to vanquish the lowly Philadelphia 76ers in five games in the first round of the playoffs.

But then, just when the Celtics started to get things figured out in the Eastern Conference semifinals, point guard Rajon Rondo dislocated his elbow. Suddenly, the Celtics found themselves running at half-speed, their engine deprived of much of its horsepower, and they quickly, and quietly, went away in five games.

Then it was on to the Eastern Conference Finals, where the Bulls who surely would knock the Heat off their perch, a hard-nosed physical team led by the league’s Most Valuable Player this season, point guard Derrick Rose, a team that willed its way to the league’s best record thanks to what Charles Barkley called, “the best defense I have ever seen.”

And it looked like that would be the case after the Heat were torched in the first game of the series, losing the opener in Chicago by 20 points. Instead, it was James who guarded Rose down the stretch of games, who combined with Wade to make an awe-inspiring run to close out Game 5 in Chicago. It looked like the Heat, after months of searching, had finally found the right formula. Udonis Haslem returned to the lineup after missing most of the season due to injury in Game 2, and immediately gave the Heat a physical presence off the bench, something they sorely missed and desperately needed. Mike Miller, after dealing with various injuries all season long, finally began playing well, too, giving them the depth they had been lacking for the vast majority of the season.

So it was with this backdrop that the Heat entered the NBA Finals for a rematch of the 2006 series with the Dallas Mavericks – even if there were only a handful of players still on both teams from that series.

The Mavericks, in many ways, are the anti-Heat. Miami’s stars plotted their course and chose to play with one another. They thought this way the best way for them to win championships. Dallas, on the other hand, is more like the Island of Misfit Toys, a team full of cast-offs and bargain bin players, almost all of whom nearly won titles in the past, but never quite had enough to win it all.

Players like Kidd, one of the greatest point guards of all-time who willed the New Jersey Nets to back-to-back Finals appearances in the early 2000s, an achievement that probably never will be given the credit it deserves. Players like Shawn Marion, who starred as part of Steve Nash’s offensive attack in Phoenix, earning the nickname “The Matrix” for his freakish athletic ability, but who had since passed through Toronto and Miami before landing with the Mavericks. Players like Tyson Chandler, once a top-three pick in the NBA Draft but who Michael Jordan essentially gave to Dallas last summer for Erick Dampier’s non-guaranteed contract. Players like J.J. Barea, who looks like he stepped on to the court straight out of a rec league at the local YMCA, and DeShawn Stevenson, a salary throw-in acquired in a trade for center Brendan Haywood last year who has turned himself into the 2011 version of Bruce Bowen – a player capable of playing lockdown defense and hitting the corner three.

So it was this group of drifters, this band of not-quite-there’s and what-ifs, who all came to Dallas in one way or another to join forces behind the team’s lone star, Dirk Nowitzki, the sweetest-shooting 7-footer of all-time, and make one last run at that ever-elusive ring. How was this group supposed to combat the speed, strength and might of Miami’s trio of stars and its deepening bench? How was this group going to hold back what seemed like an unstoppable wave that seemed destined to crash over the NBA, to officially crown King James and give him his elusive first ring?

But, somehow, that’s exactly what these Mavericks have done. They’ve gotten one brilliant performance after another from Nowitzki, their egoless star who shoots from angles that all of us fruitlessly try to repeat to win trick-shot competitions – only he makes them with ease. They’ve gotten savvy veteran leadership from Kidd, who hit the biggest shot of his career with 90 seconds remaining in last night’s 112-103 win in Game 5 to put away the game, clutch scoring in the fourth quarter from Jason Terry and bursts of energy and scoring from Barea. They’ve gotten timely shooting and quality defense from Stevenson, who’s done an admirable job on James, as well as defense, rebounding and unexpected scoring from Marion and Chandler.

It’s taken a true team effort from Dallas to carve out a 3-2 lead in this forever series, one that constantly shifts back-and-forth, possession-by-possession, each team taking turns feeling out the other. One team will get hit hard with a punch, only to stop, gather itself, and return fire. It’s basketball being played at its highest level, in its truest form, leaving fans on the edge of their seats from the beginning to end of each game, only to immediately start counting the minutes until the next time the two teams take the floor.

And, really, this is the way it should be ending. The Heat tried to deconstruct the tried-and-true model of building a champion, instead building a team from scratch and all at once, thinking that its trio of stars would be good enough to overcome whatever was thrown their way. The Mavericks, on the other hand, have been building this team for years, slowly acquiring more and more pieces, until they made their own move that pushed them over the top last summer when they acquired Chandler.

So now, with their backs firmly against the wall, LeBron James and the Heat head back to South Beach, where the world will reconvene on Sunday night to see whether this story will play out even longer, right down to the absolute last game possible, or if the Mavericks will somehow, someway, find a way to hold back what seemed, just a few days ago, a tide that was about to sweep across the NBA landscape, ushering in a new era for the league and finally giving King James a true crown and his first championship.

After the way this year began, with James and Wade and Chris Bosh preening and dancing and celebrating last July like they’d already won a title before they’d even had a single practice together, where else could this story really end? The Heat couldn’t have been knocked out in the Eastern Conference semifinals or finals; they couldn’t win or lose the NBA Finals in Dallas. No, this truly seemed, from the beginning, to be destined to end back where it all began. Back on the shores of Biscayne Bay, where James and Wade and Bosh already began planning their parade route last summer.

This was what LeBron James asked for when he announced he was taking his talents to South Beach. This is what he said he wanted. Now, it’s time to see if he’s up to the challenge. It’s back to Miami one more time, back to Miami for the only ending this season ever could have.

Back to Miami for the end of a forever series, one that’s a fitting finale to a forever season.