DALLAS (AP) – Early on in the NBA finals, Del Harris was asked if this could be the first of many trips for the Dallas Mavericks.

Harris hesitated – probably because he was the wrong guy to ask.

Harris, you see, remembers making his first appearance in the finals as a coach and figuring that a return would follow shortly.

That was 25 years ago.

Often a victim of bad luck and worse timing, Harris didn’t get back until this season as an assistant under Avery Johnson. The Mavericks trailed the Miami Heat 3-2 heading into Game 6 on Tuesday night.

“We’re not sure we’ll ever get back again,” Harris said. “We want to make the most of it. We’ve seen these windows close for whatever reason.”

Shaquille O’Neal and Moses Malone are among the dominant big men who played under the 69-year-old Harris. Still, he found that getting back to the finals was harder than he imagined.

Even Pat Riley eventually learned that lesson.

When he began his coaching career with the Lakers in the early 1980s, Riley quickly came to expect he would be playing games deep into June. Things came so easily, that he once guaranteed a repeat title at one of the Lakers’ victory parades.

Then he left and realized how good he had it. He managed one more trip during all those seasons coaching the New York Knicks and his first stint in charge of the Heat, when there was no Magic Johnson or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to throw the ball to when times got tough.

“My first nine years, I got a spot of a lot of games, a lot of championships; seven finals in nine years,” Riley said. “So to me, it seemed like it was automatic. Then after I left L.A., I realized how hard it was to get there.

“You’ve got to have great players, you’ve got to have a great organization, and you’ve got to have a lot of luck. This year, we put together a real good team with some great players. We’ve had some luck along the way, and here we are, we have an opportunity to win one. But I understand what (Harris) is saying. It’s not easy to get back.”

Riley’s team includes Alonzo Mourning and Gary Payton, gold-medal winners who are near the end of careers that have seen them win plenty of individual awards but no NBA championship rings.

But their wait doesn’t compare to the one Harris endured.

He led the Houston Rockets to the 1981 NBA finals, where they lost to the Boston Celtics. He eventually moved on to Milwaukee, first as Don Nelson’s assistant and then as the head coach for a little more than four seasons. The Bucks won plenty of games, but there was always someone better standing in their way.

The Bucks of the 80s had to go through the powerful Boston and Philadelphia teams just to make it out of the Eastern Conference, and by the early 90s the Detroit Pistons and Michael Jordan’s Bulls were on top.

He thought he had a great chance in Los Angeles, where he won more than 50 games three times as the first coach charged with making the O’Neal-Kobe Bryant partnership work.

“I had a great young team, and it was the team that ended up winning three championships, but I just had them a little early,” Harris said.

As good as O’Neal and Bryant were, the real dominant duo in the West in the mid-’90s was John Stockton and Karl Malone in Utah. The Lakers won 56 games in 1996-97 and 61 the next season, but were knocked out by the Jazz in both seasons.

The second one was the real killer for Harris. With O’Neal out for nearly a quarter of the season with an injury, the Lakers finished just behind the Jazz for the best record in the West and home-court advantage.

“Now if Shaq hadn’t missed 21 games, I think we would have had the best record in the league and things might have been different,” Harris said.

He was fired early in the next season, and the Lakers started their run of three straight titles under Phil Jackson the next season.

So when the long-awaited second chance finally arrived, Harris knew there was an urgency to take advantage of it.

“I’m hoping we can win this one,” Harris said, “because I don’t think I can go another 25 years to get to the next one.”

AP-ES-06-20-06 1855EDT