TORONTO — It was a well-attended funeral. The guests mostly wore white.

And if you didn’t think too much about what comes next, it was fun. It was loud. It was a reminder of what things could be like.

They tried to focus on the good times, all the ‘We the North’ chants that have rocked this house. There was even a heartfelt “Let’s Go Raptors” that shook the rafters midway through the fourth quarter for the first time in the series. It was a powerful reminder of how a fan base helped make a team so often ignored into a darling, something cool.

But although they fought the good fight, the Toronto Raptors died tryin’ Sunday afternoon at the Air Canada Centre, sent to an uncertain off-season by LeBron James himself, the Eastern Conference’s Grim Reaper, the one who alone decides which dreams live and which dreams die.

But this iteration of the Raptors has been on life support for a while now, the final blow likely coming when Kyle Lowry sprained an ankle in Game 2 and wasn’t able to play in Toronto on the weekend. He was dressed in all black as he sat on the bench. Was the pending free agent mourning what could possibly be his final moments as a Raptor after the five best seasons of his career?

You couldn’t help but wonder.

Every off-season has its questions but this one seems fundamental – almost existential – for the Raptors.

What do they really want to be, and how do they make it happen?

It’s the curse of the very good in the NBA, a league that venerates only the very, very best. And that guy is named LeBron James and wears No. 23 for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

“If we had LeBron on our team, too, we woulda won,” said the Raptors DeMar DeRozan, who finished with 22 points and eight assists, not enough in other words. “We can say that all day, time, everything, we didn’t. It happened. We got swept. It’s gonna be one of them long summers for us.

Officially, the death blow in Cleveland’s 109-102 win came with 2:43 left in the fourth quarter as – and this was fitting – James rocked and rolled with his dribble, putting P.J. Tucker on a string before pulling up for the long three that put Cleveland up 11, capping 14-4 run sparked by running mate Kyrie Irving after Serge Ibaka had put the Raptors up by 1 with 6:32 left on a three-point play.

Fitting because there was always the sense James was toying with the Raptors through the four games – pretending to sip beer, going through his free-throw routine before draining triples, offering to take Drake out for drinks over the weekend in Toronto – and because the few times the Raptors did challenge Cleveland they always had a turbo boost they could hit at will.

There was hope that the re-tooled Raptors could push the Cavaliers, who limped through the regular season finishing 12-15 after the all-star break, compared to the 18-7 mark the Raptors managed, most of it without an injured Lowry.

But James is now headed for his ninth Eastern Conference Finals in 14 years – “I’ll take those numbers,” he says – so it’s safe to say he understands what it takes to play deep into May and June. He finished with 35 points, nine rebounds and six assists and is on pace for the most statistically dominant playoff run ever seen in the NBA as he helped push Cleveland’s playoff winning streak to 11, dating to the NBA Finals last year.

“Anytime you have No. 23 you can flip every switch you want to,” said Casey. “What did he play? 46 minutes? People complain about that. He is the difference. They did flip a switch. They are a totally different team defensively and offensively (since the end of the regular season). Anybody that thinks anything differently doesn’t know anything about basketball.”

But the Raptors also proved vulnerable because as the Cavaliers kept lobbing one triple after another as the game continues its evolution from inside-out to outside-in, Toronto was unable to keep up and too often became too predictable in their approach as the loss dropped Toronto’s post-season record in the Casey-Lowry-DeRozan era to 17-24.

The disparity of the two teams’ ability to leverage the three has been a running theme in the series, underlined by the fact that the Raptors’ most competitive outing came in the game they took and made the most threes (29 and 10, respectively).

The Raptors scored just 81 points from deep during the series while the Cavaliers counted 183. Cleveland was shooting 47 per cent from three, the Raptors just 28 per cent.

Can the Raptors, as populated, thrive in a league where the number of three-point attempts keep rising year-over-year. Can Casey challenge his stars to adapt to a ball-movement based approach that generates those open looks?