NEW YORK — It all started with the Wu-Tang Clan.While the San Antonio Spurs were ruminating on their best half of the season in the halftime locker room, the Wu-Tang Clan was on the floor, making sure the whole arena knew it was still Knicks in 5, no matter what the scoreboard said.The Wu still believed. They had to. The Knicks did. They always do. Of course, they were right.Comfort is a fallacy in Madison Square Garden. No lead is safe, a fun thing people say to make the point that the upper hand is only as strong as its grip. But the San Antonio Spurs got greedy.They thought the game was won, not realizing 24 minutes is an eternity to throw it all away. That’s exactly what they did in a 107-106 loss Wednesday night. Sure, the Knicks were magical, as they often are. But the Spurs were simply disappointing, the worst version of themselves. It’s a version they have never quite put to rest: the persistent adversity hurdlers who forget how to lead with aplomb.When New York’s NBA Finals-record 29-point comeback was complete, it was clear that the Spurs had become their own worst enemy.“I think it’s just execution, greediness of some sort,” Victor Wembanyama said. “We clearly weren’t the most hungry in the second half.”Now, San Antonio’s season is in a place from which few have returned. They are now down 3-1 to the Knicks, heading back home for a chance to survive. Given the way this series has gone so far, there is little hope they can.The greediness peaked when De’Aaron Fox was streaking down the court with 12 seconds left, picked up the ball and went for the layup. OG Anunoby blocked the shot, giving the Knicks control of the clock down one. This was a situation in which any point guard would try to dribble out the clock, knowing the Spurs were in the bonus and he could get those two points at the line when the Knicks fouled.But for some reason, Fox decided to go for it.“I thought I’d be able to outrun him,” he said.Throughout the playoffs, the Spurs have thought they could outrun their inexperience. Wembanyama has kept saying that they don’t know what’s impossible because they’ve never faced the impossible. That has propelled them to 29-point leads, then brought them crashing down to earth. It was ironic that Fox, the steady hand on offense they’ve relied on dearly, made the fatal error.The Spurs as a whole lost their intensity, burned out and made mistake after mistake with the game on the line. They’ve had two blunders for the ages in this series, a sign that they are good enough to win the title but erratic enough to lose it.In Game 4, the Spurs became the first team in NBA history to score at least 76 points in the first half and 30 points in the second half, per OptaStats. Anunoby and Jalen Brunson combined for 37 points in the second half. This was as Jekyll and Hyde as it gets, two different teams playing two different games.Spurs coach Mitch Johnson played Wembanyama all but 58 seconds in the second half, and the center looked like he lost some of his energy in crunch time. He started settling for jump shots, and went into his one-man zone, where the defense switches across the perimeter to keep him in the paint. The Knicks found ways to get Anunoby into the weak-side corner so that Wembanyama would be responsible for him, giving Anunoby enough daylight to continue to light it up from downtown.The Spurs had some matchup confusion heading into the game’s fateful play, which ended with Wembanyama forcing a Brunson miss but Anunoby getting the game-winning putback. Another sign of inexperience. The confusion led to Wembanyama, instead of Dylan Harper, switching onto Brunson, Fox coming over to double and Anunoby being left uncovered. The ball had to bounce just right for Anunoby to pull off his tip-in, otherwise the Spurs would have won the game. But the Spurs exposed themselves to unlucky breaks and got the type of misfortune that breaks teams and seasons.Wembanyama owned the first half, but fell into a trap the Knicks have been laying for everyone. Karl-Anthony Towns was out of the game after little more than a minute, already in foul trouble. This was the golden opportunity for Wembanyama, who could then park in the paint against Mitchell Robinson and thwart the entire Knicks offense. It worked, culminating in Robinson responding to some Wembanyama trash talk by shoulder checking him in the jaw.“I’m in your head, boy!” Wembanyama appeared to tell Robinson while sitting on the floor.He was. But that was just a moment, which are fleeting against these Knicks. Winning the moments is just a mere delaying of the inevitable against them. They will storm back, no matter how far they have to charge. The Spurs let them back in and may have thrown away a championship.This explains the prevailing belief that teams have to fail before they can win. The Knicks have been going at this for years. The team could’ve been disbanded, but it stuck together and proved worthy of the time it has been given to grow. Each of those players and coaches has years of heartbreak to push them through every hopeless moment. The Spurs are just kind of building that callus. It’s the difference between playing a great half and a good game.Considering how close this series has been, a Spurs blowout heading back home would have firmly planted them in the driver’s seat. Now down 3-1 they can either look at this like they’ve had the advantage but squandered it every night, or that they are just hopeless. The former is most likely the case. But there is also little reason to believe they can win three games in a row after what we just witnessed.“I think it’s going to go one of two ways. A bad one and a good one,” Wembanyama said. “The bad one would be giving up. The good one would be getting stronger through this, getting more together. I know this is what we’re going to do.”The Spurs have to find their way out of this mess by holding each other accountable without succumbing to resentment. Frankly, pretty much everyone on the team can take a share of the blame. Nobody comes out unscathed from the biggest failure in NBA Finals history.“And after that, we either got it or we don’t,” Wembanyama said. “But we’ve proven that we can surpass these difficulties. Even though we haven’t been there before, I’m convinced we’re built that way and we’re going to use the better of this. It’s going to tighten us up.”At this point, why believe in the Spurs? It’s not even so much about fixating on the way their game disintegrated in the second half. It’s just how the Knicks never die. There is no reason to think the Knicks will ever relent, while the Spurs just showed they can, in unprecedented ways.This is a spirit-killer, a depleter of hope. Conversely, the Spurs have demonstrated throughout this series that they can always get the upper hand, and it’s just on them to keep their foot on the pedal.“I feel like this loss, s—, I mean, I’m going to bounce back,” Harper said. “We’re all going to bounce back. We’re going to show the world what we’re made of.”Time is running out. It appears they have already shown it anyway. They are a great team with more talent than anybody. They can beat anyone, even the Knicks. But the idea of the Spurs being the best team is still just a hypothetical. They’re almost out of chances to bring what they aim to be into reality.