INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Even though Rick Fox had only a few hours to rest between a late overtime game and the next morning's practice, he was awake before his alarm went off.

"It was hard to sleep last night," Fox said. "The thoughts of a championship have you on edge. It's going to be like that until it's over."

	Shaquille O'Neal is on the verge of putting away Dale Davis and the Pacers.

There's just one victory standing between the Los Angeles Lakers and an NBA title. Understandably, Fox and his teammates can't wait -- and they might not even have to wait until they get home to win it.

The Lakers hold a 3-1 advantage over the Indiana Pacers entering tonight's Game 5 of the NBA Finals. Los Angeles took a chokehold on the series with a dramatic 120-118 overtime victory in Game 4 on Wednesday night.

"We know how difficult it is to beat this team on their home court," Lakers coach Phil Jackson said. "We had to have some good fortune and some breaks here and there to win."

For a team that hasn't lost three consecutive games all season, the title seems to be in the bag for Los Angeles.

The big question is whether the Lakers can hand a particularly disheartening loss to Indiana tonight on its home floor in coach Larry Bird's final game, or whether they will be forced to return to Staples Center and tempt fate for another game.

Los Angeles has a shaky recent history in closeout games, losing three of them to Sacramento and Phoenix before coming within one quarter of blowing a 3-1 series lead to the Portland Trail Blazers in the Western Conference finals.

"No question we'd like to do it here," Robert Horry said. "That's a great test of a team, and we've had trouble closing our opponents out during the playoffs. It would be good to shake that on Friday night."

The Lakers are in this position because of a breakout game from Kobe Bryant, whose sprained left ankle should allow him to play in Game 5. He scored 28 points, including eight in overtime, and made a rebound basket with 5.9 seconds left to give the Lakers a three-point lead.

	DR. JACK IN THE HOUSE
	ESPN's Dr. Jack Ramsay discusses the keys for the Lakers and Pacers in Game 5 of the NBA Finals: Real Video: 28.8

Bryant's image underwent a fundamental change in Game 4 with his transcendent performance. The series' final game will almost certainly bring a change to Shaquille O'Neal.

For seven seasons, O'Neal's sublime skills have been tinged by his infamous comment that he had won at every level except college and the pros. With his rap albums, bad movies and flippant disregard for free-throw shooting, he was criticized by people both in and around the game.

It's hard for O'Neal to escape that past -- ABC is rebroadcasting his movie "Kazaam" this weekend. But now that he is 48 minutes away from essentially leaving that reputation behind, he claims he has Jackson to thank.

"I've always been on teams that won 50, 60 games and did OK in the playoffs, but we never had the coach that could get us over the hump," O'Neal said. "In the first, second and third series (this season), when everybody thought we were in trouble, we went back, made some adjustments and got over the hump.

"Phil Jackson and his coaches, obviously they have the experience. They know what to say, they know what to do, they know how to prepare."

But all that preparation might not be as effective without O'Neal to execute it. He has simply dominated the Pacers, averaging 38.0 points and 19.3 rebounds while completing perhaps the most impressive season by a center since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's heyday in the early 1980s.

Unless the Lakers lose the final three games, he is a cinch to become the 12th player to win the regular-season MVP and NBA Finals MVP awards in the same season.

"I think what he's done this season ranks up there with the best of them, with the best centers of all-time," Bryant said. "What Shaq is doing right now, it puts him right up there with the most dominant centers that ever played the game."

While the Lakers talked of history and tried to stay calm on Thursday, the Pacers were understandably down. As players trickled out onto the practice court at Conseco Fieldhouse, few words were exchanged among the players on a team that was one 3-pointer by Reggie Miller away from tying the series 2-2.

Indiana embraced the usual clichés about taking one game at a time and winning one for Bird, who will retire from coaching with the Pacers' final game. But the Pacers also stressed the importance of the moral victory that would come from forcing the Lakers to raise the trophy back in California, not in Indiana.

"We can't have that. We can't have that. We can't have that," Jalen Rose said of the possibility of Los Angeles ending the Pacers' season in Indianapolis. "We don't want to walk off this court as losers. We want to leave (Friday) with our heads held high, and we want to go to L.A. and see what happens."

The last time Bird faced a 3-1 deficit in the finals was 1987 -- his last appearance in the finals as a player. His Boston Celtics won Game 5 at home that year before dropping Game 6 in Los Angeles by 13 points, so Bird knows that it's a nearly impossible task.

Though tonight might be his final game, Bird doesn't intend to rouse his players with a "Win-One-for-the-Hick-From-French-Lick" speech. Bird simply wants his players to show the same unquenchable thirst for winning that he did when he was a player.

"Personally, I want it to keep going," Bird said. "I have nothing to do, so it would be nice to finish it next Wednesday.

"You can't give up in the finals. That's not what this is all about."