Kobe Bryant don’t ask

Not surprisingly, it was Kobe Bryant who made the clutch, seconds-ticking-away, fade-away jumper to give the Lakers their dramatic 90-89 victory over the Celtics [team stats] yesterday at the Garden.

But something got lost in translation in the postgame analysis.

It began with Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who spoke with reporters in the hallway outside his team’s locker room and said, “He had a couple of looks before that were good looks in that area, and we were mystified he couldn’t put it in. He told me the next one he got he was going to drop it in, so we went with it.”

We now bring you inside the Lakers locker room, where Bryant was being interviewed by the same media horde that interrogated Jackson 10 minutes earlier. Bryant was supplying the usual answers to the usual questions, when suddenly a reporter said, “Phil was talking about the fact that you told him prior to (the game-winning shot), ‘Just give me one more chance and I’ll knock the next shot down.’ Is that your mentality?”

OK. Now before we proceed, let’s point out that Kobe Bryant did not react to that question by doing some vaudevillian spit-take. He did not throw down his towel and storm out of the room, or pull a Bill Parcells and say, “Give me a break with that . . .”

But let’s also be clear on this: Legends do not ask for chances. Tom Brady [stats], back when he was winning Super Bowls, never asked Bill Belichick if he could throw the ball. Bobby Orr didn’t ask to cruise past the front of the net. And all those Celtic Hall of Famers - Russell and the Cooz, Havlicek and Cowens, Larry Legend himself - never “asked” for a chance.

They simply expected it.

It was not surprising, then, not surprising at all, that Kobe Bryant answered the question thusly: “I didn’t say, ‘Give me one more chance.’ I just said, ‘Give me the damn ball.’ I didn’t give him much of a choice.

“All we talked about,” Bryant added, “was really just the execution of it and how I was going to catch the ball. That was the only difference.”

You can love Kobe Bryant or you can hate him, but in the end - and we’re talking to Celtics fans here - you must respect him as one of those year-in-year-out, head-of-the-class players who expects to take the last shot.

Give me the damn ball.

To onetime NFL wideout Keyshawn Johnson, it was the title of a quickie book. But to guys like Kobe Bryant, it is a way of life.

It should be noted that, for purposes of book-keeping, Kobe Bryant played a rather bow-wow game yesterday. Statistically speaking, he was no great shakes.

“Throughout the course of the game I was pretty much a decoy because of all the traps and everything I did wrong,” he said. “But if I catch it at the top of the floor, it’s a different story.”

This is something else the great ones do. They motivate themselves by filing away past failures against the team they are playing now.

For Kobe Bryant, yesterday, it was all about the Lakers’ regular-season visit to the Garden last February, and, he said, “having a chance to win it at the end of regulation and having to go into overtime and do it. So I kind of wanted to redeem myself for that.”

And do you think anybody in the Garden yesterday remembered that Bryant miss?

Doesn’t make any difference. All that matters is that Kobe remembered.