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It’s unusual for a WNBA coach to call an early July game against a lottery-bound team a “must win.”

But those are the words coach Sandy Brondello used to describe how important Thursday’s 89-79 victory against the Sparks was for the Liberty.

“It’s just [about] building confidence,” Brondello said.

The defending champions talked this week about how good the vibes were with the team despite losing five of their previous seven games.

There was an understanding that those losses came when the Liberty were down two or three starters. But Thursday’s game against the Sparks — the Liberty’s first one back after a lengthy road trip — had to be different.

Leonie Fiebich was back. Sabrina Ionescu said the kink in her neck was gone. Nearly 16,000 fans packed into Barclays Center to root for them.

And it was against the flailing Sparks, who are 11th in the league standings.

But there was a moment Thursday when panic about the Liberty’s play reared its ugly head.

The Liberty were down double digits with 6:07 left in the third quarter and looked out of sorts. Shots weren’t falling.

Bad defensive miscues kept their offense from getting out in transition, all while the Sparks found their groove.

Then the Liberty took off like a Formula 1 car and left the Sparks behind.

The Liberty used a 27-6 run to turn an 11-point deficit into a 10-point lead by the fourth quarter.

“It was just a crazy five-minute run for us,” said Ionescu, who scored 10 of her 20 points in the third and finished with six rebounds and six assists. “And I feel like it has just kind of been the story of our season of how we’re able to kind of lock in, and most of the time it’s kind of annoying because we kind of do it to ourselves. But I think I’m obviously just proud of the way that we fought back.”

Natasha Cloud finished with a season-high 23 points and three 3s.

She also had seven assists and four rebounds.

Breanna Stewart recorded her third double-double this season with 17 points and 14 rebounds.

Isabelle Harrison made the momentum-turning play when she batted away Julie Allemand’s pass and took it to the basket for an and-one.

Harrison’s three-point play knotted the game at 53 with 4:14 left in the third.

It’s good that New York managed to flip the proverbial switch and close out the game in such dominant fashion.

But the Liberty can’t keep allowing opponents to build leads and get too comfortable because the shots aren’t always going to fall their way the way they did on both sides of the floor toward the end Thursday.

New York shot 35.1 percent from the field in the first half and 51.5 percent overall in the second.

After the game, Brondello said she was “proud of how we responded.”

“We got down big, and we weren’t playing good,” Brondello said. “We’re doing silly things. We just got back to being silly and not assertive, and once we turned to defense … we took away the easy stuff and found some momentum, and that’s what helped us.”

The Liberty are at home for most of this month. This is the time to get their season back on track.

The way the Liberty closed out Thursday’s game was a good start. But they need to play better for the full 40 minutes.

“Road was tough, rough. There was a lot of things that you could look at and be like, ‘Wow, we sucked at a lot,’ ” Stewart said. “But we had kind of a reality check, locked back in and really focused on ourselves.”

“I said it to the team, we just finished a third of the season basically, so now this is the second third. And how do we want that to go? How do we want to start that part of the chapter of this season? And really proud of the way that we’re resilient and fight through.”

The Liberty return to action Sunday against the Storm.