<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">MIAMI ? The Heat isn't going to pass this way again. It can't, because there's no doing the first time twice. And a first time is what this was with Shaquille O'Neal arriving and Dwyane Wade emerging and Miami counting for something on the NBA landscape as it never had counted before. More than a basketball season ended Monday night in AmericanAirlines Arena when the Heat lost to Detroit in Game 7 of a best-of-that-many Eastern Conference championship series. A team's joy ? and South Florida's, too, in a sense ? disappeared. Because the burden of time passing clicks in now, and it clicks in loudly enough so that next season will come surrounded by insistence rather than hope. "We've got to win the whole thing," O'Neal said in immediate locker-room review of the Heat's elimination. "Nobody is going to remember us winning 59 (regular-season) games or sweeping the first two rounds." He's absolutely correct. So consider the shroud of highest expectations already draped, by O'Neal himself, across next season with this one not yet cold. It now becomes about immediacy for the Heat, because O'Neal will celebrate a 34th birthday next March, and he's older than that in hoops years. The championship imperative begins to shout, not whisper, in his ear. There are signs of slippage in O'Neal's game, though he remains a massive talent. But his task and the Heat's will grow more difficult, not easier. "I don't know. You can't predict nothin'," Wade said Tuesday afternoon when asked if O'Neal would be as good next season as he was this one. That's as realistic a postmortem as was offered the day after Detroit snuffed out Miami's dream of a title. "It just hasn't been done where you put a core together and win it," Heat coach Stan Van Gundy explained. "You don't all of a sudden have it come together." But all of a sudden it is gone. The Miami acquisition of O'Neal was accomplished for the sole purpose of winning a title. He came at a primary cost of a first-round draft choice and two young players ? Lamar Odom and Caron Butler ? who would have been a significant part of the franchise's long-term future. There's no such thing as long-term anything for the Heat with regard to O'Neal. Most probably, Miami's best chance to be a champion with O'Neal happens next season, or the one after that at the latest if a contract extension is worked out. Anything beyond those two years on the calendar has the look of too long to trust O'Neal being a dominant factor.</div> Source
