And there it was: Nuggets-Lak­ers, The Play­off His­to­ry, summed up in about 2.1 seconds.

1! … 2!. … 3! …

The man in the blue shirt and the bowtie is count­ing again. Slow­ly. Loud­ly. Michael Malone’s Nuggets are face down on the can­vas for the third time in four weeks, eyes swollen shut, bleed­ing from the fore­head, car­toon birdies cir­cling overhead.

At least this time, they saw what hit them. Or rather, who.

“I think I had a real­ly good con­test, I think I was right there,” Den­ver cen­ter Niko­la Jokic, who poured in 30 points, said of the Antho­ny Davis 3‑pointer at the buzzer Sun­day night that gave the Lak­ers a 2–0 series lead in the West­ern Con­fer­ence Finals. “He shot the ball real­ly well.

“I kind of felt it (was) going in and I think it was (a) swish. Great play­ers make great shots.”

4! …5! …

“Yeah, I mean los­ing (stinks), that’s the bot­tom line,” Mal­one, the Nuggets’ coach, said qui­et­ly after the game. “Los­ing (stinks). Some guys like to win. Some guys hate to lose. (We’ve) got a group of guys that hate to lose.”

Lak­ers 105, Nuggets 103.

Man, was there a lot to hate in this game if you’re a Nuggets fan.

The three missed free throws, two of them by reserve PJ Dozi­er, over the final six minutes.

The last shot, most­ly, and whether Mason Plum­lee should have left Davis to help out Jera­mi Grant on LeBron James, leav­ing A.D. open on the perimeter.

We know bet­ter than to count them out com­plete­ly. After 3–1 once, 3–1 twice, you nev­er, nev­er say never.

But this one?

This one left a scar.

This series feels dif­fer­ent. The kar­ma feels dif­fer­ent. The bas­ket­ball gods have trad­ed their Max­ie Min­er shorts in for a uni­brow and a 6‑pack of Sprite. His­to­ry is his­to­ry now. If the Nuggets can some­how get off the mat after this one, Mal­one is coach of the century.

Because it’s one thing to get dragged behind the wood­shed. It’s anoth­er to ball out, as this bunch did Sun­day, to leave every­thing out there, to clean up old mis­takes, to get stops, to force turnovers, to get to the line, to sur­pass the Lak­ers’ intensity …

… and then have Davis plunge a dag­ger in between your shoul­der blades as the horn goes off.

The Nuggets went to the free-throw stripe 14 more times. They fought back after being down 16 in the third quar­ter. They led by 1, 103–102, with 1.5 sec­onds left. It was Clip­pers all over again.

Until it wasn’t.

“We were in (this) before, I think, (in) the sec­ond or third game against the Clip­pers and we had it and kind of lost it at the end,” the Jok­er said. “We put in the effort. We put in the fight. We lost the game. But I think we played well most of the game.”

They won the sec­ond half by leaps and bounds, which is anoth­er rea­son Sun­day hurt so much. The third-quar­ter bite was back. The effort was, too. But a 10-point half­time deficit against James feels more like 15 or 20. You expend so much ener­gy, men­tal and phys­i­cal, just try­ing to claw back to with­in shout­ing dis­tance that when the time comes to push the tur­bo but­ton, fumes are the only thing left in the tank.

And yet the fumes were work­ing. Some­how, as Jokic kept the Nuggets in the game.

Den­ver outscored the Lak­ers 24–12 over the final eight min­utes of the fourth quar­ter. Jokic scored 11 con­sec­u­tive points over the last three min­utes to flip an eight-point deficit into a 1‑point Nuggets lead with 20.8 sec­onds on the clock.

7! … 8! …

“This the West­ern Con­fer­ence finals,” Mal­one said. “No moral vic­to­ries. No sil­ver linings.”

No sec­ond chances. No regrets. For all those come­backs, all that his­to­ry, the Nuggets are star­ing at an 0–2 hole in a series for the first time dur­ing Malone’s reign.

It’s just a num­ber, grant­ed. But the man in the bowtie is count­ing loud­er now, and you hope, under­neath all that ring­ing, that the Nuggets can hear him.