A Rousing Six-cess

They entered the spartan visitor’s locker room after the conclusion, the conclusion to this season anyway, and huddled to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a tradition Coach Phil Jackson started several years ago. Then the Chicago Bulls sprayed champagne.

It was the third year in a row and the sixth in the last eight seasons for that other routine, finalized with an 87-86 victory over the Utah Jazz at the Delta Center and 4-2 win in the NBA finals marking a repeat three-peat and the only fitting departure if it does turn out to be the end. Knowing that it might be, and what it took to get there, that’s what guarantees a unique standing for this one.

So Scottie Pippen cried on the court amid the celebration, after a very sore back had limited him to only 26 minutes. And Michael Jordan contemplated the future, after perhaps beating the past with a performance that may be greater than any of his others that have come before, these 44 minutes that produced 45 points and the biggest defensive play and the biggest offensive play, the 17-footer with 5.2 seconds left for the victory. And they all emerged convinced that this had been something special, the night and the whole season.

“This is the sweetest one,” said Toni Kukoc, a member of the last three title teams, the ones that followed Jordan’s baseball hiatus. “It’s the toughest one that we’ve got so far, but it’s the sweetest one, especially since earlier in the season, when they said we were underdogs.”

Which maybe made it all the more fitting it would end this way, battling through a Pippen injury and surviving until the end, as opposed to some of the previous years when the runs were marked more by the wreckage left behind by opponents. If this season was about scratching through, then so too would the final game.

Jordan had 23 of their 45 points in the first half, tired early in the fourth quarter as he was forced to carry the entire offensive load while Pippen was mostly reduced to a passer, and then emerged anew. His two free throws with 59.2 seconds left got the Bulls a tie after they had trailed for most of the period. His drive down the right side with 37.1 seconds remaining at least emotionally answered a three-pointer by John Stockton moments before.

The defending champions were down, 86-85, and facing the very real possibility of a deciding Game 7 here on Wednesday and being on the wrong side of the greatest comeback in finals history, when the Jazz would have been trying to become the first team to win after a 3-1 deficit. Utah got the ball back after Jordan’s drive. It ended up in the strong hands of Karl Malone, being defended on the left post by Dennis Rodman.

But when Jordan left Jeff Hornacek along the baseline and snuck up on Malone’s right side and slapped the ball free with 19 seconds to play, the Bulls were at least in position for the win. When they put the outcome in Jordan’s latest attempt at history--an amazing end to an amazing career?--the result was storybook: he started to penetrate down the middle, pulled up at the top of the free-throw circle and lost defender Bryon Russell, and hit.

It was 87-86, Bulls. When Stockton’s three-pointer from the right side at the buzzer caromed off the front of the rim, it was over.

“Last year, the fifth game here, [when Jordan had a bad case of flu], I didn’t think you could top that performance he had in that game,” Chicago Coach Phil Jackson said. “But he topped it tonight. I think it’s the best performance I’ve seen in a critical situation and critical game in the series.”

Said Jerry Krause, the team’s operations chief: “Yeah, because it meant winning.”

It meant another chapter in the Jordan lore that had long ago approached mythological proportions, and the end of another chapter for the Bulls. This run came with rebounding (first in the league in percentage) and defense (fifth in shooting-against) and, of course, the usual sideshow. What had emerged by the time the finals arrived was that the group that has dominated the decade was also, in the end, forced to prove it could endure.

Pippen’s foot injury at the start of the season was the first test, when he missed the opening 35 games and the Bulls lost five times by five points or less, showing how they actually could have far surpassed the 62 wins with a healthy club. They had only one other such defeat with Pippen in the lineup.

And then there was the constant focus on whether this season would be it for Jordan and, therefore, the Bulls as they had come to be known. There were the Dennis Rodman exploits, which by 1998 had come to be regarded as somewhere between minor annoyance and genuine frustration as some players began to speak out that he would make mistakes in games because he missed areas that were covered in practice. Finally, the Eastern Conference finals brought the biggest threat of all to the breakup coming somewhere other than from within, when the Indiana Pacers pushed them to the fourth quarter in Game 7.

“It was mentally draining more than anything,” Rodman said. “The last couple years have been more like people expected us to win. This year was more like we had to dig down deep inside.”

Eventually finding their way back to the top, of course, a happy ending for the NBA’s running soap opera. As if by routine.

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Bulls By The Numbers

6 NBA titles in the ‘90s

5 Number of titles clinched in series’ sixth game

12-5 Home record in finals

12-6 Road record in finals

10.7 Average margin of victory

2 Number of players on all six championship teams (Jordan, Pippen)

26 NBA game-winning shots for Jordan, whose jumper with 5.2 seconds left sealed title