It was a week ago that the Los Angeles Clippers, the city’s eternal “other” team, looked bound for the Western Conference finals. Much to our surprise.

Up 3-1 on the Houston Rockets after a blowout victory in Game 4 … it was going to happen! The Clippers in the conference finals for the first time!

And then?

The Clippers remembered they are … the Clippers.

A more generous take on this is that they were a team with very little quality on their bench, and Doc Rivers’s attempts to play his starting five heavy minutes … finally caught up to them.

Well, sorta.

They were thrashed in Game 5, but then they had their great chance. In Staples Center. Three days ago.

The glorious chance that Clippers fans (yes, some people are; front-runners will always be with us) will remember that their team could not seize.

Up 19 over the Rockets in the second half, ahead 92-79 going into the fourth quarter …

And then they were outscored 40-15 in the fourth quarter. With the ill/ineffectual James Harden on the bench.

J.A. Adande, ESPN columnist, suggested via tweet that it was the biggest collapse he had ever seen, eclipsing Portland coughing up a 15-point fourth quarter lead against the Lakers in 2000 — because those Blazers were on the road.

(I clearly remember sitting next to colleague Chris Wiley at that game, early in the fourth quarter, dividing up the stories we would do about the Lakers getting blown out at home in Game 7.)

Imagine the horror, in the arena, as the Clippers melted into puddles of shapeless protoplasm.

Certainly, their bench were no more than puddles of goo; collectively, they were 6-for-22 in the game, and the Clips were outscored by 27 points when Jamal Crawford, their best reserve, was on the floor.

There could not have been a single Clippers fan who didn’t think, “Actually, I knew this was coming.”

Because that is what the Clippers do, and have always done, and they are going to have to break through those barriers before this current run of good teams will be seen as anything other than a temporary run of decent results, which led to nothing special, until the Lakers retook Los Angeles, as God and nature intended.