LOS ANGELES — The Liberty have no one to blame but themselves for Sunday’s 98-97 loss to the Los Angeles Sparks.

The Liberty squandered a 17-point third-quarter lead. They got comfortable, perhaps even complacent. It resulted in New York fighting with the Sparks down the stretch, only to lose on Nneka Ogwumike’s buzzer-beating 3-pointer.

“We got to just figure out how to play with a lead,” Sabrina Ionescu said. “We haven’t really figured that out yet. I feel like in a lot of games that we’ve lost, we’ve been up and then given up a lead, so we have to be better at managing their runs. Obviously, when teams are down by that much, they’re going to come even harder and harder and not get complacent and we, in turn, have to do the same thing.”

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It was Ogwumike and Rae Burrell who led the Sparks’ charge back into the game. The rest of Los Angeles followed suit, including the fans who came alive during the Sparks’ rally.

Erica Wheeler drained a game-tying 3-pointer with about 5:31 left in the fourth quarter, sending Crypto.com Arena into mania.

New York and Los Angeles exchanged baskets for the rest of the game.

In crunch time, coach Chris DeMarco entrusted rookie Pauline Astier with the starting lineups over Sabrina Ionescu, who looked out of sorts and was unusually quiet on offense.

Astier scored five of her 17 points in the final two minutes.

The Sparks forced the Liberty into a shot-clock violation in a two-point game with 33.3 seconds left — a 9.3-second differential in the shot clock.

Kelsey Plum’s 3-point attempt rolled off the rim. Breanna Stewart secured the rebound and was immediately fouled.

She hit the back of the rim on her first free throw and drained the second to give the Liberty a 3-point lead.

Astier blocked Wheeler’s 3-point attempt. The Sparks corralled the ball, and Stewart fouled Burrell, who drained her free throws to make it a one-point lead.

On the other end, Stewart, again, split a pair of free throws with 8.6 seconds left to give the Liberty a two-point lead. On the last play, a miscommunication by the Liberty led to Ogwumike’s game-winner.

“They really started to get into what they do well as a team,” Jones said when asked about how the team responded to the Sparks’ fourth-quarter run. “The fact that they didn’t really get into it early kind of lulled us to sleep a little bit and then. … they started to execute some of their things.

“We have to do a better job of just being a little more locked in on things that we talked about even if a team isn’t playing that well early on in the game.”

DeMarco shook things up Sunday.

Two days after the Washington Mystics snapped the Liberty’s eight-game winning streak, DeMarco made a change to the starting lineup: Promoting Satou Sabally in Marine Johannès’ place.

The move felt inevitable. Sabally, a three-time All-Star, was only coming off the bench as the team gradually upped her minutes after a lengthy layoff during the offseason because of a concussion.

Sabally led all scorers at halftime with 11 points and finished with 14 points, seven assists and five rebounds. Johannès contributed 10 points off the bench.

Ionescu didn’t attempt a shot in the first half, but the Liberty still led by 12 at the break.

The Liberty opened the third quarter shooting 3-for-4 from deep, which aided in the team taking a mighty lead.

All they had to do was maintain a lead. But the Liberty failed.

The loss, the Liberty’s second consecutive defeat, is going to sting for a while. It’s not the way the team wanted to open its four-game West Coast swing.

“[It’s] something we’ll definitely go back, watch film, learn from,” Ionescu said, “and see how we can improve.”