THIS SHOCKING FAILURE IS OF EPIC PROPORTIONS.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. - As they promised, though not quite the way they intended, the 2003-04 Lakers of the four superstars and the dynastic pretensions became a basketball team like no other.

No other team that played all the way to the NBA Finals ever came out of it smelling so much like failure. No team that went so far ever fell so far short of its own and everybody else's expectations. And no team that did so many amazing things ever ended up with so much to feel bad about.

``We didn't get the job done,'' Kobe Bryant said at about midnight here Tuesday in the understatement of his longest year.

This season began last summer with the additions of Karl Malone and Gary Payton to a lineup with Shaquille O'Neal and Bryant and the premise that anything less than the team's fourth NBA championship in five seasons would constitute failure.

It ended on frenzied night at The Palace with an embarrassingly one- sided defeat as they fell behind by 28 points on the way to a 100-87 loss and a four-games-to-one pasting by Larry Brown's Detroit Pistons.

League commissioner David Stern was charitable in praising the runners-up for a ''valiant effort.''

They couldn't have suffered more comprehensive humiliation than they did in losing four times by an average of 13 points in a series where only Bryant's desperation 3-pointer in Game 2 prevented the most shocking sweep in the sport's history.

Yes, there have been upsets before in the NBA Finals, though not as many as in the championship rounds of America's other major professional sports.

But few, if any, have completed the undoing of quite so elaborate a plan for such a high-flying franchise.

Judging by their first comments after the Pistons' red, white and blue confetti landed on them, it will be a while before they feel the disappointment.

``So, it didn't come out quite as well as it has in the past, but I'm proud of my players,'' Lakers coach Phil Jackson said.

``I respect these guys, I'm proud of these guys, I feel the same way about these guys as I did the day I came here,'' Malone said.

``I'm so proud of this team,'' Derek Fisher said. ''We didn't have to be here ...''

But when it hits them, they are sure to feel the failure collectively and individually.

For Malone and Payton, it's one more season in which they couldn't quite win an NBA title, Malone because he couldn't squeeze one more healthy season out of his 40-year-old body and Payton because the great point guard couldn't adapt to the sport's most successful offense.

For O'Neal, it's a defeat that leaves him stuck on three rings, which would be a paltry career total for the sport's self-advertised most dominating player.

For Bryant, it's a defeat that many will pin on the inability of the sport's most spectacular clutch player to rise to the occasion in any of the past three games.

For Jackson, it's the first defeat in an NBA Finals after the coach's record-tying nine title triumphs.

And since Bryant might not be back with the Lakers next season for either basketball or legal reasons, and Jackson said there's only a ``pretty slim chance'' of his remaining - and even the contractually bound O'Neal hinted mysteriously at exploring options this summer - their grand-scale failure over the past 10 days reads like their signature.

Not that they didn't jump through some hoops just to get to the NBA Finals.

Malone missed half the regular season with his first knee injury, messing up the teamwork that had come together so quickly at the start, but the Lakers finished strong to grab the Pacific Division title.

The San Antonio Spurs jumped ahead of them 2-0 in the conference semifinals and premature obituaries were written, but the Lakers ran off four victories in a row to move ahead.

Before they could get past San Antonio, they had to go to the final four-tenths of a second of the pivotal Game 5 and will Fisher's buzzer- beater into the basket.

Of course, what looked like heroics at the time now cuts another way, the natural suspicion being that the Lakes deserved to tumble long before Tuesday in suburban Detroit.

They sure didn't look close to champions as Detroit revved up its celebration, going so far as to post the championship-parade schedule on the arena video screen with 2:56 left in the game.

They were beaten by a consistently hard-working, back-to-basics, finely blended squad of Pistons who exposed all of the Lakers' tragic deficiencies and gave ammunition to every critic of Lakers teamwork and character.

Jackson has said that high expectations can bring huge disappointment, or something to that effect, and his team has proved the point.

Billed as basketball's greatest collection of talent, it will have to settle for being the most epic failure.