Miami ? This is your nightmare, America.

This is your deepest sports fear. This is the team you wanted to fall, still standing. This is the player the national media promised couldn’t win the big one, on the verge of winning the biggest one of all.

This is the voice that for months preached patience to your ridicule, that talked sacrifice to your scoffing, that only asked to let this season play out to the continuous sound of you letting your glee out.

“We’re still four wins away,” LeBron James said.

Oh, Lord. Not him, huh?

“We’re going to work like we always have,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.

And, please, not them, right?

The bad news, America, is the Heat are still going. Here’s the worst: If Dallas can’t step forward and save the Republic in these NBA Finals, what will stop the Heat over the next several years?

Injuries?

Prayers?

Dwight Howard to the Lakers?

This was the year to chop down the Heat. They looked like a kid lost in the mall at times. They struggled. They argued. They had key injuries and the Internet world rummaging through their timeout huddles on a nightly basis.

They still needed barely more than the minimum in running through the Eastern Conference. They trumped Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago in five games each. Close games. But close series?

Wait until Heat President Pat Riley gets an offseason to fill in the holes. And wait until players line up this summer to play for the Heat. Mike Bibby offered a sign of things to come in February when he ripped up the $6.2 million deal he was guaranteed next season to play with the Heat this year.

So Dallas is your last hope, America. And it’s a good one if you look how it’s spun through the Western Conference as easily as the Heat has the East. Their offensive star, Dirk Nowitzki, is fueled by a 2006 Finals loss to the Heat, too. He feels this is his chance for a title

That’s a storyline. Here’s another: LeBron James needs to win one for his legacy more. Nowitzki was called one of the game’s 10 greatest players by his coach and the national media only debated if he actually was one of the 10 or 20 greatest. That won’t change if he loses this series.

Everything changes for LeBron, though. Everyone’s attacks return. And do you know what owner shoveled the most dirt on him and the Heat behind Cleveland’s Dan Gilbert?

Dallas owner Mark Cuban demanded the league investigate the Heat’s signing of the Big Three. He said he warned LeBron against signing with the Heat, because no team had ever blown up their team and then added a couple free agents and won a championship. It’s always taken someone coming from a good team to make it better and put them over the top.

He went on Dallas radio and said this to the co-hosts about the Heat’s November swoon, “Hallelujah, boys, is this great or what? … How cool is that? Now they could still turn it around and win out for all that matters, but you’re starting to see some of the problems.

“Any team with a strong, big guy that can score, they’re getting abused by…They just don’t have size to battle. They have the fewest points in the paint of any team and that’s tough.”

Now Cuban has gone silent, like most of the Heat critics. And guess what, America?

It’s not November anymore. It’s May. It’s the NBA Finals. And it’s your worst nightmare, because the Heat are still playing.

Dallas is the last hope for you now. And not just the last hope for this year. The way the Heat is set up and the NBA landscape looks, this might be your best hope to stop the Heat for the next several years.