We've never seen a team like these Pacers

Midway through the fourth quarter, down 17 points, fumbling their way through a number of mental miscues and seemingly running out of gas, there was nothing to indicate that the Indiana Pacers were going to win Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals in Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night. Nothing, except for the fact that they're the Pacers, and we'd already seen them steal games in historically improbable fashion from the Bucks and Cavaliers in the playoffs' first two rounds.

Even so, it didn't feel like the New York Knicks - who conjured their own incredible comeback magic to topple the heavily favored Celtics in the second round - were about to become Indiana's latest victims. They'd ratcheted up their defense, were executing with precision offensively, and had taken control of a previously nip-and-tuck game by putting together a 17-2 run with star point guard Jalen Brunson on the bench in foul trouble. Even as New York went into prevent offense mode late, Aaron Nesmith started banging threes to eat into the lead, and that familiar Pacers feeling began to creep in, it was clear the clock was going to run out on this comeback bid.

The Knicks were still making shots, after all, scoring 12 points in the last four minutes of regulation. They still led by 14 with under three minutes to play, and by nine inside the final minute. Unfortunately for them, Nesmith downed a bottle of Steph's Secret Stuff before checking into the game with exactly five minutes to play and took the court as the greatest shooter to ever touch a basketball. He scored 20 points across those five minutes, shooting 6-for-6 from deep and canning two free throws after OG Anunoby intentionally fouled him in the corner as the Knicks clung to a three-point lead with 12 seconds to play.

The Knicks almost threw the ball away on the ensuing inbounds play when Brunson got trapped in the backcourt, but his prayer of a pass trickled to Anunoby, who was quickly fouled. He split the pair of the free throws, which set the stage for Tyrese Haliburton to do this:

It was Nesmith who got the Pacers back in the game, but of course it had to be Haliburton who completed the comeback, like he did against Milwaukee and Cleveland. That shot was the 11th Haliburton made this season with a chance to tie or take the lead in the final two minutes ... in 12 attempts. The fact the ball kicked off the heel and careened 15 feet in the air before dropping through the net this time merely added to the aura of absurdity and inevitability surrounding him and the Pacers this postseason.

His toe grazed the 3-point line when he launched it, taking some of the magic out of what otherwise would've been one of the most iconic endings in NBA history - complete with the Reggie Miller callback, with Miller watching from the broadcast table in the same building he silenced in similar fashion 30 years ago. Instead of icing the win, the shot merely forced overtime, but that just set the stage for more end-of-game Pacers theatrics.

The Knicks scored the first two buckets of the extra frame and looked primed to stretch their lead to six points with Brunson driving down a seam. Then Myles Turner swooped in to block (or possibly goaltend) the layup attempt, and Andrew Nembhard drilled a three at the other end. The teams traded buckets from there until Nembhard (another frequent hero of these comebacks and this playoff run) slipped free of a spacey Josh Hart with a slot cut and finished a layup off a slick feed from Haliburton. At the other end, he shot the gap to deflect the Knicks' inbounds pass off Brunson and out of bounds. And then Rick Carlisle drew up a side-out play that sprung Obi Toppin for an insane double-clutch dunk. Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns missed pretty decent 3-point looks to tie, and Indiana somehow walked off victorious. Again.

Coming into this postseason, only one team in the play-by-play era (which dates back to 1997) had ever come back to win a playoff game after being down three possessions in the final minute of regulation or overtime: the 2014 Thunder against the Clippers in the infamous Chris Paul meltdown game. The Pacers have quadrupled that total in three weeks.

Games in which they've erased deficits of 20, 20, 19, and now 17 points account for four of their nine playoff wins. They might singlehandedly force a recalibration of a whole bunch of win-probability models, because in what universe can a team overcome 99% odds of defeat multiple times the same postseason? How can you watch any of their remaining games in these playoffs and ever think they're out of it?

In searching for comparisons to this team, the only one I could come up with was the 2011 Dallas Mavericks, who authored multiple double-digit fourth-quarter comebacks of their own (albeit none this dramatic in the final minute) en route to the championship. These Pacers obviously have a long way to go if they want to enshrine their legacy in the same fashion, but their coach knows a thing or two about that:

Those Mavericks hold the record for playoff clutch-time point differential in the play-by-play era, putting up a plus-71 in 50 such minutes. Dirk Nowitzki scored 66 points on 76.8% true shooting in those 50 minutes. Haliburton and the Pacers may not reach those raw totals, but for now they're 6-0 in games involving clutch time with a 56.3 net rating (Dallas finished at 60.3), and they're building a similar sense of inevitability.

Whether or not the Pacers manage to keep this going and finish the job, this is a run that's going to be remembered for a long, long time. We've never seen anything quite like it.