The night Kobe stopped waiting his turn

The Lakers lead two games to one, and they are in Indianapolis.

Larry Bird's Pacers are playing their last chance, and they know it. Reggie Miller is thirty-four, Rik Smits is thirty-three with feet that hurt him every night. This team will not come back. It is now or never, and Conseco Fieldhouse has reached a volume television does not convey.

Indiana put up thirty-three points in the first quarter and lead by ten.

On the Lakers side everything has gone through Shaquille O'Neal since the series began, and Indiana have given up on the idea of guarding him. Only one strategy remains, brutal and openly admitted: make him foul, send two bodies at every possession, accept the baskets conceded in exchange for an early exit. It is not defense, it is accounting.

Nobody is asking what the Lakers would do without him. The question has never come up.

The strategy works.

Shaq crushes the game for forty-seven minutes — he will finish with thirty-six points and twenty-one rebounds, numbers that belong to another decade — and he fouls out anyway. Sixth foul, two minutes thirty-three from the end of overtime. Indiana have paid full price and got exactly what they wanted.

And that is where the game becomes something else.

Kobe Bryant is twenty-one. He is playing on an ankle he turned in Game 2, the one that kept him out of Game 3 entirely. For two years he has been told the same sentence in different forms: wait your turn, this is Shaq's team, you will have time.

He scores eight of the Lakers' sixteen overtime points, on four shots from five.

The moment replayed is the last one: an offensive rebound plucked from among the big men, put back over Rik Smits with seconds left. Nothing spectacular on the tape. A twenty-one-year-old going to get a ball nobody handed him.

At the other end, Reggie Miller plays all fifty minutes, scores thirty-five points on six of nine from beyond the arc, and loses.

120-118.

This game turns the series. The Lakers lead three to one, will close it out in six, and launch the three-peat.

But it does something else, more lasting and more toxic: it answers a question nobody had dared ask. When Shaq is gone, the team does not collapse. It wins anyway.

From that June night, the cohabitation changes nature. This is no longer a dominant centre surrounded by a promising young talent, it is two men who each know they can carry a title. The three years that follow will be the most dominant in the franchise's modern history, and the most unliveable. The 2004 breakup begins here, in a victory.

For Indiana the arithmetic is simpler and crueller. Reggie Miller will never reach the Finals again. Larry Bird will leave the bench at the end of the season. An entire generation of Pacers ended in that building, playing what was probably its best game.

That is often how eras cross: one gives everything it has, and it is not enough.