THE buzzer groaned, long and loud, mournfully meandering around the rapidly evacuating arena, chasing the Knicks off the court, shooing them into summer. Stephon Marbury stood upright for half a beat, ripped his No. 3 jersey out of his shorts, shook his head, peered at the scoreboard.

The numbers weren’t going away: Nets 81, Knicks 78. No matter how long he stared, no matter how badly he may have wanted to rewind the previous half-hour, the Nets were still going to be celebrating in their corner of Madison Square Garden, and the Knicks’ fans were still going to be muttering to themselves as they descended into Penn Station for the long ride home.

And the Knicks were still going to be love-3 down in this playoff series.

“Damn!” Marbury barked as he stalked off the court, as the rest of the Knicks officially walked away from the meaningful portion of their basketball season. The schedule insists there will be a Game 4 Sunday, and perhaps the most rabid believers among the faithful can speak bravely of a miracle after that. Everyone else understands. Even the Knicks understand.

Marbury certainly does.

“So close,” Marbury said. “But so far away.”

There will be other playoff moments for Marbury, other games in other springs where he’ll be the difference between a Knicks win and a Knicks loss. He’ll make every big shot, every huge free throw, every clutch play.

It just wasn’t going to happen this time. Not this night, when the Nets were begging to be beaten, when the Knicks stepped up with a fourth-quarter defensive stand plucked right out of the spring of 1994. The Nets missed 13 straight shots. The Knicks went on a desperate run. One shot could have made the difference. One pass. One play.

Marbury missed a layup, duped by Jason Kidd. He missed a 3-pointer badly, late in the game, early in the clock, when a 2 would have tied the game. And he missed the first of two foul shots with three seconds left, when the only chance the Knicks had was for him to make the first, miss the second, pray for a beneficial bounce.

“You get to the end of a playoff game like that, everything that happens gets pretty magnified,” Lenny Wilkens said. “There will be a lot of things we remember.”

Marbury, you can be sure, will do most of the remembering. He will do most of the simmering, across the summer, across next season, until the next time he has a season cradled in his hands the way he did last night. He’d vowed to play 48 minutes and he played 48 minutes. Never question Marbury’s motives, or his mettle, not after that.

But the Knicks were depleted, and desperate, and what they needed, at the end, was for Marbury to manufacture magic, to parlay the crowd’s pleas with the Nets’ buckling knees. His All-Star heart had kept them close. They needed his All-Star talent to close the deal. He couldn’t do it. There will be other moments. Just not this moment. He’ll never get this one back.

“You just have to continue to play,” Marbury said. “I continued to play. I tried to make plays for others and I continued to try to make plays for myself. We just didn’t do the things down the stretch when we were supposed to.”

Over those 48 minutes, he was 7-for-23 from the field, he was 1-for-4 from beyond the 3-point arc, he had 10 assists, and there were long stretches where he was the only Knick who had any idea what he was doing on either end of the floor, the only Knick who seemed to understand the gravity of the game, the urgency of the mission. If wanting it were enough, the Knicks would be down 2-1 this morning, and Marbury would have leapt on the scorer’s table in triumph.

It wasn’t enough. On this night, the Knicks needed Marbury to be Marbury. The man wearing No. 3 kept them close. He couldn’t seal the deal. Not this game. Not this time.

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Three-falling

Before this matchup with the Nets, the Knicks had fallen behind 3-0 in a best-of-7 series three times. Here’s a look at how they fared:

Year + Round + Opponent + Result

1951 + NBA Finals + Rochester + Lost in 7

1978 + Eastern Semis + 76ers + Lost in 4

1983 + Eastern Semis + 76ers + Lost in 4