MIAMI – The Heat wanted to contain Vince Carter. They hoped to prevent Richard Jefferson from getting to the line. They sought to cut off the Nets’ running game.

Done. Done. Done.

So entering Game 5 of the Eastern Conference semifinals here last night, the Nets were pretty much done.

But Heat coach Pat Riley wouldn’t think that way.

“The Nets are alive. We did not win a series on Sunday, we won a game,” Riley said.

And the Nets desperately sought to keep their very faint pulse going.

“If you believe you can win the series then obviously you’re going to have to win tonight,” Lawrence Frank said before Miami went for the kill, set up by its two-game sweep of the Nets in New Jersey. “There’s no magic potion, no magic formula.”

Frank, in a motivational ploy, put “Start of Our Finest Hour . . . Belief-Trust-Execution . . . Why Not Us?” on the locker room board before the game.

“I think the Miami ballboys must have wrote that,” Frank said.

The Nets unraveled in critical fourth-quarter stretches in Games 3 and 4 to put themselves in the precarious situation. But they insisted that looking back was silly and frustrating.

“We’ve got to win. Nothing else can be said. You can break it down a million ways. We have to win tonight. That’s pretty much the bottom line,” Jefferson said.

Carter said, “It’s time to play. We got to win. It is that simple.”

Though Riley admitted he was less than thrilled with his team’s overall defense in Game 4, the Heat nevertheless achieved what they set out to do. Carter had not been the 38.5 points a game assassin he was in the regular season. Jefferson had gotten to the free-throw line about as frequently as he had gotten to Antarctica, with 10 free-throw attempts in four games. And though the Nets had some run-outs, they hadn’t run silly on the Heat.

Plus, Dwyane Wade had danced on the Nets’ heads all series.

“He can go hard right, he can go hard left, and there’s not a lot you can do about it. And he can improvise – crazy,” said Lamond Murray, who had assumed a bigger role for the Nets after the drug policy violation-suspension of Cliff Robinson, which drastically weakened the bench.

Though the Heat had gone over 100 points in three straight games, the Nets’ average of 91.0 in those games was as damaging. Riley said he knew the Heat would not shut down Carter. So they did the next best thing.

“It’s all about containment. We’re trying to contain Vince. You can’t stop him,” Riley said. “We want to contain their four scorers. And we have different rules on each guy. But Vince is the guy who averaged 40 against us during the regular season so we have to do something a little differently with him.”

The Heat basically erected a defensive wall designed to stop Carter and prevent Jefferson from penetrating and getting to the line. The Nets had been unable to figure it out and had one more shot last night.

“We know he’s [Jefferson] an attacking basketball player. He wants to put the ball on the floor and get to the free-throw line, get easy points that way,” Gary Payton said. “What we have been doing is funneling him in to the middle, making people help and making him kick the ball.”

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Nets vs. Heat

At a glance

Game Date Site Time TV Radio

Game 1 Nets 100, Heat 88

Game 2 Heat 111, Nets 89

Game 3 Heat 103, Nets 92

Game 4 Heat 102, Nets 92

Game 5 Last night @Mia

x-Game 6 Tomorrow @NJ 8:00 ESPN TBD

x-Game 7 Sunday @Mia TBD TBD TBD

WBBR (1130 AM) x-if necessary