OAKLAND — The game ended, the Toronto Raptors mobbed the floor at Oracle Arena and Kawhi Leonard even smiled. NBA officials rushed to put the stage together, Kyle Lowry triumphantly lifted the gold Larry O’Brien Trophy and ski goggles were passed out as players sprayed each other with champagne.

Up close, it looked and felt like every other title that has ever been won. The Raptors will get their parade through the streets of Toronto, rings will be passed out to long-deserving players like Marc Gasol, and the NBA record book will forever call them champions for the 2018-19 season.

There will be no asterisk attached to the Raptors, nor should there be one. The NBA Finals turned into a war of attrition, and they were the team left standing after six games, beating the Golden State Warriors 114-110 at Oracle Arena.

But outside of Canada, where they will rightfully celebrate this as one of the greatest sports moments in a nation’s history, this has to go down as one of the saddest finals we’ve ever seen. Because of what it could have been. Because of the cost to ligaments and tendons that left us cringing at the sight of Kevin Durant grabbing at his Achilles on Monday night and Klay Thompson holding his knee on Thursday.

Even if you wanted the Warriors to lose, even if you were rooting for their dynasty to end, there was no joy or justice in this — just rotten luck that didn’t allow us to see them take on these Raptors at even a fraction of their full potential.

“Just amazing that we were sitting in this position where we have a chance to win the game and force a Game 7 and go back to Toronto, and you just think, how?” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “How has this group of guys put themselves in position to do it? And then when Klay goes down and is out for the game, it's just sort of, you got to be kidding me. Like, this has to stop. But it's just the way it's gone.”

The Raptors won Game 6, but they didn’t go and grab it as much as they held on by cuticles as the Warriors physically fell apart. It shouldn’t have been so hard, but it was, owing all to Toronto’s own demons in closing out its first title and the ever-present threat of Stephen Curry having just enough juice to do this all by himself.

From the moment it became clear Kevin Durant wouldn’t be a factor in this series, it was Toronto’s to lose. And when Klay Thompson landed awkwardly on his left knee late after a contested dunk attempt in the third quarter, taking him out of the rest of the game with what was later diagnosed as a torn ACL, it barely seemed like a fair fight.

“They had a rough year injury-wise, and they kept playing,” Toronto coach Nick Nurse said. “They got through some playoff rounds and guys in and out. And they got a lot of bad breaks in The Finals, to be honest. But like us, they kept on playing. We just had to keep on playing no matter who was out there.”

These aren’t excuses for Golden State. The Warriors don’t need any, and Toronto is the deserving champion. Between the Raptors and what was left of the Warriors by the end of Finals, they were the better team. It says a lot about the grit Golden State has that it made the Raptors sweat this out until the last possible second, long after the series should have been over.

In fact, it literally took a Chris Webber-at-Michigan moment — Draymond Green calling a timeout when Golden State didn’t have one with 0.9 seconds left — before the Raptors could exhale and even slightly begin to celebrate.

Just think about how close it was: A mere two seconds earlier, a Curry three to take the lead was in the air. Given the physical state of the Warriors, it probably wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the series had it gone in. But it sure would have given the Raptors a lot to think about for the next 72 hours.

For Toronto, avoiding that scenario has to be relief as much as joy.

“They showed you how much heart they have, how much what it means to be a championship team,” Gasol said. “They didn't make any excuses, they kept playing, they kept coming at you every possession offensively and defensively. So very much respect for those guys and their organization. With that said, I'm very happy that we won.”

For the rest of us, though, the fact this series was decided largely on injuries is unfortunate because it had the potential to be so much more. There were moments when we saw it — the first quarter of Game 5 when Durant valiantly came back from his calf injury and was drilling threes like he hadn’t been out a month, the entire first half of Game 6 when the teams were throwing haymakers at each other. In those stretches, the basketball was pulsating and beautiful and bringing out the very best of Curry and Thompson as well as Kawhi Leonard and the super-clutch Fred VanVleet.

And if there’d been a Game 7 with a healthy Thompson and momentum and the Raptors starting to lose some belief, this was destined to be the coin flip of all coin flips. It could have been a classic.

Instead, the series devolved into something like a zombie film where the living barely found a way to escape without getting bitten.

“In the history of the NBA you could highlight every team that was supposed to win or had the best team and all the different story lines and over 82 games and a full playoff run, a lot can happen,” Curry said. “It's just a matter of how much you fight and just leave it all out there on the floor. I think the way that we have talked and described this journey and whatnot, I don't think there's ever been a situation where we have taken anything for granted. And that's something I can look back and just hold. We all can hold our head high that we gave it everything we got.”

It’s not the Raptors’ fault, but you want to see a new champion knock off a team like Golden State by kicking down the door, not scrambling to hold on against a shell of a dynasty.

If not for VanVleet, who made three massive 3-pointers in the fourth quarter to settle the Raptors when they were grinding through some nervous possessions, the story might not yet have an ending.

“Clearly just wasn’t our year,” Green said. “But that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.”

When an NBA season ends, we like to be able to draw conclusions about what we just saw. Unfortunately, the only one we’ll have from this Finals series is that the team that didn’t lose two star players to injuries had just enough to get over the finish line. In the end, Toronto was better, and yes, much luckier.

Canada should celebrate what happened over these last two weeks and celebrate hard. You never know when it’s going to happen again.

But for the rest of us, we can only conclude that injuries robbed us of what might have been one of the most dramatic finishes in NBA playoff history.

Could Golden State have actually pulled this off with one more body intact? Sadly, we’ll never know.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Dan Wolken on Twitter @DanWolken