“I’ve got to make the best decision for everybody involved, not only myself but the team, and make sure I’m not a liability,” he said. “We’ll visit the doctors and see what parts work and don’t and go from there. If it is [the end], I couldn’t picture a better point to go out on top like this.”

Family support

Actress Gabrielle Union stood on boyfriend Dwyane Wade’s locker and put it all in perspective. “This,” she said, “was the game I wanted him to play. When he got in early foul trouble, he didn’t hang his head.”

What do you most admire about Dwyane?

“His resilience,” she said. “Everybody makes mistakes in life. He doesn’t make the same mistake twice. We’re all just so supportive, whether that’s his mom, me and his dad. Everyone who loves him. He never makes excuses, he’s never going to complain, he’s going to get back.”

And then, a playful jab: “Sometimes I wish he would get back a little sooner” defensively.

Wade couldn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m. the night before the game, then awoke and called James at 8 a.m.

“What they wanted to do more than anything was to play a complete game,” Union said. “They kept saying, ‘We haven’t played a complete game yet. We have defensive lapses. We have offensive lapses.’ For them to play such an amazing, complete game was a beautiful thing to watch.

“Mike Miller was an assassin! Shane Battier has been an assassin! [Mario Chalmers] is like the baby I’ve never had. For Chalmy to step up the way he did, unbelievable. After all the negativity and all the haters, they didn’t win today!”

Union then mentioned “the poor man that was a survivor of the bath salt attack [Ronald Poppo]. When they said, ‘Anything you want to say?’ He said, ‘Let’s go, Heat.’ It’s about surviving and living for the next moment. If that man did not personify that, nothing will. Real Heat fan. When Charles Barkley said we don’t have real Heat fans, point to that man. We have real Heat fans.”

Happiest man

There was Udonis Haslem, who’s the happiest man in the world who willingly gave up $14 million — the difference between what Dallas and Denver offered him in 2010, compared to the five-year, $20 million deal he signed to stay in Miami.

“We rolled the dice, we sacrificed to come here, and it all paid off,” he said. “Our character showed.”

Haslem and Wade were the only players on both the Heat’s ‘06 Heat championship team and this one. But this title is “way better, 10 times better,” Haslem said, “because of all we’ve been through. It felt all the time like the world was against this Heat team. LeBron’s postseason was similar to what we got from D-Wade in ’06.”

‘We got better’

Standing in the middle of the blissful bedlam was Shane Battier, who noted that after Chris Bosh’s injury, “it took a 215-pound power forward” — speaking of his move from small forward.

“Indiana tried to out-tough us. Boston tried to out-kick us. We were supposed to kneel by the end. We were not going to be denied once we got here. We got better with every game. We always figured it out.”

Battier, who won an NCAA title at Duke, waited 11 years for an NBA one. “You never think it’s going to happen to you,” he said. “But that’s why I wanted to come here. All I wanted was a chance.”

His first title

Cavorting about the locker room was Juwan Howard, exulting and dancing, redness in his eyes and passion in his voice, speaking emotionally not about himself, but LeBron.

“I don’t know what people will say now,” Howard said. “He’s done everything! Now, what are they going to try to beat him up about? What did he do wrong this time? He’s LeBron James, world champion! Give the guy a break. Everybody wrote us off, like we weren’t going to win the big one.”

For Howard, it was first championship of an 18-year career, ending one of the league’s longest droughts. (Kevin Willis needed 19 years to win his first title.) He’s also the first member of Michigan’s famous Fab Five college team to win a ring. ESPN’s Jalen Rose, another member of that Fab Five team, came into the locker room after the game to give Howard a tearful embrace.

“I gave Juwan a hug,” Arison said, “and I told him, ‘The irony of the commissioner voiding that [Heat] deal, I don’t know, 15 years ago, and for you to win a championship here. The Fab Five finally got one!’ ”

Far more significantly, LeBron finally got one.

“The King,” Shaquille O’Neal said on the AmericanAirlines floor afterward, “has finally been coronated.”