BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Two minutes before the end of the fourth quarter of Game 1, the WNBA emailed the list of players scheduled to speak at the post-game press conference. Postgame media has operated this way since the league closed its locker rooms to reporters a few years ago. You can ask other players to chat outside if necessary, but the obvious stars usually end up in front of the microphones. The Minnesota Lynx, who were then down nine points, would send out Napheesa Collier and Kayla McBride to talk. McBride had her best shooting night of the playoffs, calming the New York crowd as it got carried away by the Liberty’s transition flurries in the first quarter. Collier played a textbook defensive game. But about 60 real minutes and 400 lifetimes later, Minnesota’s leading scorer arrived in the interview room. “Whaddup, whaddup, whaddup!” she crowed as she walked to the table. Courtney Williams had changed the plan.

Williams shined on the other end of perhaps the greatest WNBA Finals game ever, which the Lynx won 95-93 in overtime on Thursday after trailing the Liberty by nearly five seconds. If “best ever” sounds hyperbolic, maybe I’m channeling Williams, who was asked where her four-point lead was in her career and replied, “It’s one now, because we’re here.” I like to be where my feet are.” The Lynx trailed by 15 points with five minutes to play, a deficit no team had ever overcome in the finals. But a mix of tactical changes and clutch moves erased the Liberty’s lead – and my memories of it.

Collier, a basketball player’s basketball player, has never been accused of cheating, and that often belies the extent of her talents. After Collier won Defensive Player of the Year over A’ja Wilson, Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon said she didn’t think voters should be sent down a “rabbit hole of analysis” to pick awards. But the case heard Thursday evening hardly required the eye of a connoisseur. Collier grew and shrank as needed, switching to Sabrina Ionescu and killing the Liberty pick-and-roll herself. (Ionescu’s ugly last line: 8-for-26 shooting.) More often, she guarded Breanna Stewart, who is four inches taller and shot 1-for-11 with Collier as her primary defender. For her final shot, Collier beat an even taller Jonquel Jones and blocked a shot on a possession she had gone the other way. She would end the night with three steals and six blocks to go with 21 points. Crucially, Collier was able to make late-game stops at the five, helping a small Lynx lineup get back into it.

Williams created the chaotic final minute of the match, which the referees more or less improvised. The guard hit a tying three and committed a shooting foul, giving the Lynx a one-point lead with five seconds left. On the Liberty’s next inbound play, Collier was able to knock the ball away, and it appeared to go out of bounds off Stewart’s boot, but the officials went with a “jump ball” call. Crew chief Isaac Barnett later told the pool reporter that none of the match officials had “definitive knowledge” of the last player to touch the ball. Such plays can only be judged when challenged; because neither team had a timeout left to challenge the call, the jump ball stood. When Williams was called for a jump ball foul to give New York possession, it looked like the Liberty might escape. Stewart was fouled on her shot attempt with 0.8 seconds left. She made her first free throw but missed the second, sending the game into overtime.

Five Minutes Extra presented the full range of Courtney Williams. When the Lynx were up by four, they attempted a pass that Ionescu swept to make it a 93-91 game with 32 seconds to play. (Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve asked Williams about it after the game: “The five assists, the one you threw to Sab, does that count?”) Another steal later, this time from Jones, and the game was once again tied with eight. seconds left. But it had to end, and it ended at the hands of the woman who would always be at the postgame presser no matter what. Collier spun through the tangle of arms in the Liberty frontcourt and coolly hit a game-winning fadeaway over Jones.

To the Liberty, the Lynx may have seemed oddly secure in their downsides. When Collier has struggled in these playoffs, length has bothered her, and this big Liberty team tends to pose the same matchup problems as the Connecticut Sun. On the offensive glass, New York outscored Minnesota 20-5. Jones, ready to cash in, led all scorers with 24 points. But like McBride, her evening became the wreckage of a hundred written and discarded game stories. Minnesota went with an undersized lineup to close out the game: “If the bigs didn’t rebound, they might as well go small. It can’t get any worse, can it?” Reeve explained – and George Costanza’s opposite strategy worked. The Lynx showed up on the glass when it mattered: Alanna Smith, whose play Reeve described as “understated,” rebounded a Williams miss and gave her another shot at the equalizer.

Sometimes I struggle to square the Liberty fandom as depicted: the stylish elephant; the affirming, pleasant atmosphere! – with Liberty basketball, the current and often annoying product. It can be a bit like a birthday party at the dentist. It’s not a generous thing to say about a talented player who just dismissed his last opponent in the Finals and has four more chances at a championship this year, but no team has a worse ratio of stressful watching to relief in victory.

This time they didn’t win. The Liberty attributed the result to execution, and they are not wrong. Stewart called a smoked layup at the end of overtime “one of my cleanest looks,” even though she would have had an even cleaner chance to end the game in regulation, at the free-throw line. Regardless, this game may have felt stolen by the winner, but it can’t be called anything other than a crushing loss for New York. Minnesota’s concession on the offensive glass, and a series of live-ball turnovers in the first quarter, allowed the Liberty to make 90 shots to Minnesota’s 71. New York led by as many as 18 points, even as Ionescu and Stewart scored stinkers. Ionescu, the star of Liberty’s Series win over Vegas, had a particularly bad night; with her closeout, she finally turned Williams’ attempt to turn the match into something more.

I’m not sure either team has seen a fully realized version of the other yet, which should scare them both but excite us all. Courtney Vandersloot, an elder stateswoman who experienced both a magical title run and an unthinkable playoff chokejob, said after Thursday’s game that this was the craziest she had been a part of. For the first time in a long time, basketball was the only thing WNBA fans had to go crazy about. Every existential issue Commissioner Cathy Engelbert had discussed in her pregame comments about the state of play fell away, except one: Starting next year, the finals will be played as a best-of-seven series. All you could ask for after that was more.