THE NBA / MARK HEISLER : It Was Great, Unless You’re Nick Anderson

You want to talk about the classics?

No, not Shakespeare. This is the NBA, where a classic is Gar Heard’s shot for Phoenix in the triple-overtime thriller at Boston in 1976.

It’s Magic Johnson playing center against the Philadelphia 76ers in 1980 and (sorry, Jerry West) the balloons in the Forum ceiling in 1969 and Frank Selvy’s miss and Don Nelson’s lucky bounce. . . .

Now it’s Game 1 of these finals too, with the Houston Rockets coming from 20 points down, tying it on Kenny Smith’s three-point shot with one second left in regulation, watching the Orlando Magic tie them on Dennis Scott’s three-point basket with five seconds left in overtime and winning on Hakeem Olajuwon’s tip-in.

The game ended near midnight, Eastern time. Mike Lopresti of the Gannett New Service, trying to sum everything up fast, considered a lead paragraph, “You saw it, you write it.”

Participants reassembling events early Thursday morning discovered they’d been in something special.

“From our standpoint,” said Richie Adubato, a Magic assistant coach, “I don’t think you look at it that way, until you go back and watch the tape.

“From our standpoint, all you’re doing is sweating, ruining your clothes.”

The winning coach, Rudy Tomjanovich, lately a veteran of such games, dragged himself out of bed several hours later for practice and vowed to find the strength to go on.

“It takes a lot out of you,” he said. “Even the happy times.

“Your adrenaline level gets so high. My heart doesn’t stop beating fast until about 3 a.m. You wake up, you feel like you’ve been in a boxing match. You’re sore. You’re stiff. It takes a toll on your body. There’s only so many times you can do that.

“I don’t know if it’d be any fun if you took your emotions out of it, if you mellowed out. Maybe that’s a natural progression. Right now, I’m not at that point.”

Magic goat Nick Anderson, who has long pined for more attention, got as much as he could handle. He had to explain over and over how he missed four free throws in the last 10 seconds of regulation, any one of which probably would have locked up the game.

There were several other questions too.

Such as, why didn’t the Magic foul Smith before he got off his tying three-point shot?

Coach Brian Hill said afterward that “isn’t my philosophy.”

Adubato, backing his boss the next day, suggested there are times one might consider it.

“That’s a never-ending decision that you have to make,” Adubato said. “But we knew the play. We diagramed the play in the huddle; we knew exactly where Kenny Smith was coming from. We knew they were going to pick and roll. As it turned out, we were right on him. He just threw a nice head fake and got us to leave our feet and make the shot.

“It was like the Indiana series where [Rik] Smits made the last shot. We had that play too.”

How nice for them.

Wasn’t Anderson supposed to step over the line and get a delay-of-game warning so they could take a look at the play first?

“I stepped over the line,” Anderson said. “Maybe I was late getting there.”

Expecting the delay of game, Penny Hardaway, guarding Smith, was caught by surprise. Hardaway, a good defender, wound up getting faked out of the play.

And wouldn’t it have been nice if Anderson, also a good defender, had overplayed notoriously right-handed Clyde Drexler on the final play and kept him from penetrating and drawing Shaquille O’Neal away from Olajuwon?

Anderson said he was knocked off stride by a screen and couldn’t recover.

“He [Drexler] just made a quick move to the right,” Anderson said. “He’s a strong player to the right.”

No, it wasn’t a good night to be Nick Anderson, but he held up wonderfully, answering questions willingly and cheerfully.

“I’ve been through situations that some people can’t imagine,” said Anderson, a survivor of Chicago’s West Side whose friend, prep star Behn Wilson, was killed in a drive-by shooting.

“It made me stronger. Because I feel like when I’m on the floor, I don’t back down from nobody. I don’t care who it is, I don’t do it. I respect players, but I’m all about a challenge. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. And this old dog won’t back down.”

The spring of ‘94, when the slow-down New York Knicks played the pre-fairy tale Rockets, and Pat Riley drove NBA officials crazy, and the O.J. Simpson car chase preempted one game, seemed a long time ago. NBA officials are now considering permanent anti-Knick legislation.

At midseason, marksmen such as Reggie Miller and Larry Bird complained about the new, shorter three-pointer, but if this postseason is any indication of its impact on the game, you can color it here to stay.

The NBA, it’s back.