Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs arrived ahead of schedule this season.

With 22-year-old Wembanyama starring alongside 21-year-old Stephon Castle and 20-year-old Dylan Harper, the Spurs made the leap from the NBA lottery to producing the league’s second-best record in a single season.

When they got to the playoffs, they largely romped through the first two rounds, then unseated a reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder team that not long ago was touted as a burgeoning dynasty. The did so in an emotional seven-game Western Conference finals that left Wembanyama in tears of joy when it was over.

When they arrived to the NBA Finals, they did so as the second-youngest team in Finals history and as a favorite to beat the more experienced New York Knicks for the NBA championship.

In the end, their youth and inexperience caught up with them as a hungrier and more experienced Knicks team secured an emotional NBA championship Saturday night with a Game 5 win to secure a 4-1 NBA Finals victory. One of those four losses included one of the greatest collapses in U.S. Sports history as the Knicks rallied from 29 points down to win Game 4.

For much of the series, the Spurs looked like the better team as they took double-digit leads in the first quarter of each game and led for 72% of the series’ total playing time. But they blew those leads in four of the five games and repeatedly broke down in the clutch. San Antonio held the lead or was tied in the final two minutes of each game, but could only manage to win one of the five.

When the dust settled on Game 5 as the Jalen-Brunson led Knicks celebrated an NBA title in the visiting locker room at San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center, Wembanyama reflected in comments to media:

“I think compared to anything before, this is the biggest lesson of my life,” Wembanyama told reporters. “The biggest learning moment.

“I can’t tell exactly what the lesson is. But we’re learning from that for sure. I’m learning, more than any other time in my life before.”

Indeed, the postgame podium is a difficult place to put together an autopsy and pinpoint the precise reasons things went so wrong for the Spurs at the worst possible times in the Finals. But Wembanyama did offer a jumping-off point to start finding a correction.

“One of many things I learned is the margin of error was very, very thin,” Wembanyama said. “Our domination stints — we absolutely dominated for most of this series. But our errors, our mistakes are punished so hard that we can’t have ups and downs like this, so much.

“The ups are OK. The downs is the reason we lost.”

Wembanyama’s not the first superstar to bump his head in the chase for his first NBA championship. In fact, historically, this is the path.

Michael Jordan had to battle for years through the Boston Celtics and Detroit Pistons before leading the Bulls to the franchise’s first of six NBA championship in his seventh NBA season. LeBron James didn’t win the first of his four titles until his ninth NBA season with his second NBA team in his third trip to the NBA Finals.

James’ second Finals trip in his first season with the Miami Heat produced an upset loss to an underdog Dallas Mavericks’ team not dissimilar to San Antonio’s against New York.

But the way the Spurs lost this series after controlling each game will require some soul-searching from the top down to figure out exactly what went wrong — and to make sure it doesn’t become embedded in this team’s DNA.