INDIANAPOLIS — Another season of not-good-enough ended, unofficially, with a grim-faced James L. Dolan leading a lock-step entourage in a quick-striding getaway across the bowels of Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Dolan, the bewildering strongman of a Madison Square Garden empire that includes the Knicks, wasn’t waiting around for the buzzer to sound on a deflating Eastern Conference semifinal series and one more championship-less N.B.A. season.

He was gone into the humid Indiana night by the time his 54-win team trudged off the court and into a fourth decade of franchise failure, underachievement marked this time by a blurring narrative and newsreel.

In falling to the younger, bigger and more athletic Pacers, 106-99, Saturday night to lose in six games, the Knicks were haunted by a Georgetown center (Roy Hibbert), an explosive 25-point, 10-rebound performance by a product of Stephon Marbury’s Brooklyn high school (Lincoln’s Lance Stephenson) and an alumnus of Dolan’s school of hard-to-fathom Knicks (Donnie Walsh).

In the case of Walsh, 72, maybe we should consider him more gulag escapee than graduate.

Walsh was hired by Dolan in 2008 to fix an organization broken in large part by Dolan’s erratic and at times inept stewardship. A native New Yorker, Walsh could take only three years of Dolan’s oppressive environment before returning this season to his longtime adoptive home with the Pacers as a self-described caretaker.