It was fun while it lasted.

The Phoenix Suns’ amazing season finally came to an end on Wednesday night, but the effects will linger for years. While their 62 wins were a substantial accomplishment, the Suns’ impact went far beyond wins and losses. Years from now, fans may look back and say this is the team that revived pro basketball.

I don’t think that’s too great an exaggeration. At the start of this season, both NBA attendance and scoring were sagging, and it’s pretty easy to see that the two were connected. Scoring had been in sharp decline since the mid-1980s, when teams averaged over 110 points per game. By 2003-04, that figure had dwindled to 93.4.

Not coincidentally, the game’s popularity grew exponentially in the mid-’80s. Other factors besides scoring contributed to its growth: the dissolution of the ABA, the addition of the 3-point line, and, of course, the arrival of Bird and Magic. But it was the high-scoring, entertaining brand of basketball exemplified by the Lakers’ “Showtime” attack that lured so many new fans.

Although scoring began to slump in the ’90s, the league still had the momentum of the ’80s – not to mention Michael Jordan – on its side, so the growth continued apace. However, Jordan’s retirement brought an abrupt end to that growth. Without His Airness, we were treated to a series of Heat-Knicks slugfests that seemed to get lower-scoring every year.

Along with the dip in scoring, a slew of uptight coaches began sucking the fun right out of the game. Men like Larry Brown, Jeff Van Gundy, and Pat Riley were all incredibly effective, but their styles were hard on the eyes. Their teams rarely ran, fouled liberally, and preferred defensive specialists to offensive maestros.

This is why the 2004-05 Suns have been such a breath of fresh air. While other coaches said you couldn’t win by playing helter-skelter, Phoenix reveled in it. The Suns revived everything that the league represented two decades ago. They ran at every opportunity, frequently scoring transition lay-ups within seconds of a basket by their opponent. They shot tons of 3-pointers, leading the NBA in both attempts and makes. While everyone else went big, they played ridiculously small. The Suns used a 6-foot-10-inch center; a 6-foot-7-inch, 210-pound “power” forward, and a small forward generously listed at 6 feet 5 inches.

Of course, in order to succeed they needed a coach who believed this heretical style could work, and Mike D’Antoni was perfect for the job. Some old-school types frowned on his system, thinking that all he did was roll the balls out. In truth, what he did was genius. D’Antoni recognized that going small was the only way his team could win. While other coaches might have insisted on having a “real” center and calling lots of set plays to overcome his team’s lack of “talent,” D’Antoni figured that his team had more than enough ability if it just pushed the pedal to the metal.

The most shocking part of his strategy is that he rarely called any plays. Nearly every Phoenix possession was an improvisation of some sort, which most coaches would consider sacrilege. But D’Antoni realized that having Steve Nash make things up as he went along was far more effective than anything he could script. Besides, the Suns were far too busy running the ball down their opponents’ throats to look to the sidelines for a play call.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that this would work, but when this season started, most experts (including yours truly) thought this team would be lucky to finish above .500. Yes, they would score points, but the Suns had no size or depth and looked horribly overmatched on defense. Little did we know that Amare Stoudemire would explode into one of the game’s dominant big men, that Nash would have a career year, or that the Suns’ starting five would stay healthy the entire year. Better yet, we didn’t know the impact of the league’s new rule on hand checking on the perimeter, which made it possible for a quick team like the Suns to run amok.

You know the rest: They had a 33-win turnaround, the third-best in NBA history. They were the highest-scoring team in a decade. Nash won the MVP, D’Antoni won Coach of the Year, and team president Bryan Colangelo won Executive of the Year.

And in doing so, they started a new era in basketball. Even if the Suns fall flat next season, the change they’ve made to the face of the NBA is likely to be permanent. When something works as amazingly well as it did for Phoenix, it’s only a matter of time before other teams begin to imitate it.

As I write this, there are probably 10 NBA general managers concocting plans for how their teams can win with a style similar to the Suns’ – playing smaller guys with offensive skills, running more, and using less structure. Thanks to the Suns, the pendulum has swung back to offense, and not a moment too soon.

So while we may have to suffer through another defensive struggle in the NBA Finals this June, it may be the last one for a while. For that, all of us basketball fans owe the Suns our gratitude. I only wish their season could have lasted a little longer.