SAN ANTONIO – Suddenly, it was as if the Spurs were running one of those five-on-none practice drills. They were all by themselves on the floor at SBC Center, no impediments, no worries. The Nets had vanished. They’d been up by nine points, and seemed ready to keep their basketball season alive another three days.

And then: nothing.

No stops. No baskets. Nothing. Suddenly, as you watched the most critical part of this season unfold, the Spurs were all by themselves. Stephen Jackson was making every 3 he looked at. Speedy Claxton was running the offense like a 10-year pro. Tim Duncan was, well, Tim Duncan. And Kenyon Martin kept hoisting one shot after another, helping the Spurs every bit as much as any of the Spurs was. It was endless. It was remarkable.

It was the end. And everyone knew it. Everyone could sense it. A 19-0 run? You don’t win NBA championships by giving up 19-0 runs in the fourth quarter. And the Nets weren’t going to win this. They couldn’t. Not with Duncan throwing up a triple-double. And not with their own ill-timed ineptitude.

It ended 88-77. It will be a bitter pill to keep under their tongues across the length of the summer. It will be an awful memory to drag back to New Jersey with them. And, if this truly was the swan song of the Jason Kidd Era, it was a most inappropriate way for all of it to end.

The way it ended, it was almost impossible to remember how it had started. The Nets exploded from the gate in a way that has been so sorely missing from their repertoire during this series, in a way that will surely allow them to wonder how things might have gone had they played this way for a week rather than a half.

Richard Jefferson was everywhere, scoring inside, scoring outside, hitting layups, hitting jumpers, hitting bank shots. The Nets never allowed themselves to be intimidated by the Spurs’ devastating 1-2 punch inside, even though Duncan and David Robinson combined for eight first-half blocks.

In its own way, watching Jefferson, Martin, Aaron Williams and Jason Collins keep coming after the Spurs – and watching the growing respect that both Duncan and Robinson showed for that resilience – was reminiscent of the way Rocky Balboa kept coming after Apollo Creed in the best of the “Rocky” movies. And it set an early tone that the Nets weren’t going to leave these playoffs quietly.

“The way I look at it, they still have to beat us,” Martin had said in the morning, about nine hours before Game 6’s opening tap. “The pressure is on them, all of it. They have the upper hand, and they can knock us out, but if they don’t then it’s one game for everything. They’re in a better spot than us right now. But we can get right back there if we play as hard as we can play.”

They did that in the game’s opening 24 minutes. They played hard, and they played well, and they seized a pair of 10-point leads that offered them a little cushion from the crushing pressure of a close-out game and the deafening pleas of an SBC Center crowd harboring visions of an all-night South Texas party.

The remarkable thing about all of this is that they accomplished much of the damage with Kidd once again missing his “A” game. In fact, it was when Anthony Johnson took his six-minute shift at the end of the first quarter and the beginning of the second when the Nets took their biggest leads of the game.

Still, it was a Kidd 3-pointer right at the end of the half that allowed the Nets to go into the locker room feeling good about themselves. The Spurs had roared back from a 31-21 deficit to pull even at 38-38 on a Duncan turnaround, and there was a decisive feeling inside the arena that once the Spurs took the lead, they would never give it back. When Kidd’s ball splashed through, just before the buzzer, it put off that assumed inevitability for a bit.

But only a little bit.