BRYANT NO ONE-MAN GANG NOW.

Byline: RAMONA SHELBURNE 

SALT LAKE CITY - The silence was golden.

Championship golden.

At times in the first threequarters of the Lakers' 108-105 victory over Utah on Friday, it was so quiet in the normally raucous Energy Solutions Arena, you could almost hear the wind whistling softly off the still snow-capped Wasatch Mountains in the distance

Then it was loud. Heart- thumping, pulse-racing loud. The Jazz, left for dead and plummeting quickly into an early, disappointing offseason just a few minutes earlier, roared back.

No, ROARED back. Like a thunderstorm rolling off those mountains, ready to flood the SaltLake Valley below.

Mehmet Okur made a 3-pointer, then Andrei Kirilenko drilled back-to-back 3s. In the final 4minutes and 31 seconds, the Jazz scored 19points to cut the Lakers once-insurmountable lead to shreds. The sellout crowd had one more chance to bring the house down on the Lakers.

But the Lakers were golden.

Very few players can stand under that roar. Calmly, with a strong base, and sink two free throws as Lamar Odom did with 19 seconds left and every person in the house screaming at the top of his lungs, fingers crossed and every fiber hoping desperately to help clank just one of them off the rim. A few moments later, Kobe Bryant did the very same thing. Then Derek Fisher made the first of his two shots from the line. In all, the Lakers were 11 of 13 from the line in the fourth quarter. They did it, because they did not stand alone.

"It's a beautiful thing when we are all on the same page," Odom said. "A beautiful thing."

Will it be a golden thing?

Only two teams in this postseason have won a second-round game on the road.

Championship teams though, find a way.

Yes, the Lakers nearly blew a 19-point halftime lead with sloppy ball-handling and defensive lapses in the final five minutes. But that happens sometimes when the bleachers start to shake and the floor underneath them feels like it's swaying. The Lakers withstood it, because they stood together.

Kobe Bryant's bad back might have cost the Lakers Game 4 Sunday, but in the end, it might be the thing that pushes them to a title.

This is Kobe's team. The pressure, the responsibility, the glory all his.

But every once in a while it's good for the other players to feel some of what Bryant takes on every night.

To reach out and grab the ball in a crucial possession, to face boos if they disappear for a quarter or miss six shots in a row. But also to hear the cheers when those shots go in and feel a true sense of ownership in the win.

Friday night, there could be no other way.

"In a weird way it kind of does help the whole team," Lakers forward Luke Walton said.

"When we just rely on him, we don't play our best. We can still win like that, but we give ourselves the best chance to win when we're all contributing."

With Bryant's back was just one awkward torque away from betraying him again, he became more of a playmaker in the final two games of this series. So Odom drove to the basket like there was only one direction his compass could point, Fisher took jumper after jumper, like it was a 3-point shooting contest at the All-Star game, Pau Gasol crashed the offensive boards and all but ran over the backside of Okur. All five starters finished with at least 12 points Friday.

It sounds so simple. Everyone being aggressive, everyone taking responsibility. But there's a big difference between doing that as a complementary player and doing it to win a series, because there is no other way.

Bryant, bad back and all, gave the Lakers everything he had to win the series. He might be the only player in the world who could've banked in that 22-foot jumper with the shot clock running down to extend the Lakers' lead to 99-88 after the Jazz had rallied to within eight points.

But could he score 49 points and dish out 10assists again? Could he score 12 straight points in a three-minute span in the fourth quarter?

Who knows? It never came to that. And in the long run, the Lakers will be better for it.

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