I’m not sure we’ll ever see a five-game NBA Finals that close any time soon. I’ll say we won’t.

It will go in the books as a win for the New York Knicks, which culminated in their first NBA championship in 53 years, breaking a drought that had seemed like a curse at times — for long stretches of time — for one of the NBA’s marquee franchises.

Hopefully, the island of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs survive this, as Knicks fans' joy levels will likely need to be measured on the Richter scale. And hopefully the good city of San Antonio — which hosted so many Knicks fans who made the trip to Texas for Game 5 — will survive this, too.

The hard-fought 94-90 win topped a hard-fought series for the Knicks over the up-and-coming San Antonio Spurs, with the Knicks completing one of the most impressive playoff runs in NBA history.

The team that won 53 games in the regular season and was the third seed in the Eastern Conference went 16-3 on their way to the title. And even with all five games in the Finals coming down to the final two minutes, and the two teams being separated by just 12 total points, the Knicks' 15.5-point average victory margin for the playoffs was the largest in the 30 years that the NBA has tracked it.

But even at that, Game 5 was there for the Spurs to win, or the Knicks to lose. For the fifth straight game, the Spurs opened a double-digit lead in the first quarter and for the fifth straight game, the Spurs held a fourth-quarter lead.

San Antonio was up by 10 with 8:21 to play before the Knicks went on a 10-0 run to tie the game, with all 10 points coming from Jalen Brunson, who took his rightful place in both Knicks and NBA lore by scoring 15 of his 45 points in the final frame to lead the Knicks to the win.

Meanwhile, the Spurs stumbled and fumbled through the fourth quarter once again, the part of the game when the NBA’s most talented young team and a group that seems poised to make several Finals appearances over the next 10 years will need to figure out if they are going to win the number of titles their youthful talent suggests they can.

The Spurs shot 7-of-22 in the fourth quarter Saturday with Stephon Castle, De’Aaron Fox and Victor Wembanyama — their three primary scorers — combining to go 2-for-12. For the series, the Spurs' offensive rating in the fourth quarter was 90.5 points per 100 possessions. For context, the Washington Wizards, a team trying to lose as many games as possible during the regular season, had a fourth-quarter offensive rating of 111.4.

The Spurs will deeply regret costly mistakes that burned them at the end of Game 2, and especially in Game 4 when the Spurs surrendered a 29-point lead in the second half and a 20-point lead in the fourth quarter in the biggest collapse in Finals history. But as the youngest Finals team since 1977, the Spurs should have plenty of time to learn and reflect.

They could do a lot worse than studying what the Knicks have built: a selfless, resilient team that rallies behind their clear leader, Brunson. The Knicks found a way........

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