The New York Liberty needed a reminder that they’re not invincible. The Minnesota Lynx were happy to help. The Lynx dominated the Liberty for three quarters on Sunday at Barclays Center, withstanding a furious New York comeback in the fourth to win, 88-79.

A Liberty win would have secured the No. 1 seed in the playoffs, ensuring them of home-court advantage no matter how far they advance. They came out, however, without the urgency or poise that they’ve shown when they’ve been at their best.

The Lynx shot the lights out in the first quarter, which didn’t help, but the Liberty gave them too many clean looks, got beaten to too many loose balls, and committed too many turnovers early on.

The always candid Breanna Stewart summed it up after the game.

“Right now we’re not good enough,” she said. “And we know that we have two regular season games left. We know we want to clinch, one, but also know that we have to work and we have to be better and we want to be our best come playoff time.”

Stewart doesn’t mean the Liberty aren’t good enough to win a championship — she’s been around this league long enough to know that they are. But they did not play to the standard that they’ve set for themselves, and that Stewart has done her best to live up to since she was beating ranked teams by 40 at UConn.

It’s not about simply having the talent to win a championship. It’s being able to show it every night with no exceptions.

The Lynx will likely be the 2 seed in the WNBA Playoffs, which start next week. And while every team in the league has had a lapse or two, the Lynx have been razor-sharp in all four games they’ve played against the Liberty this year. As a result, they’ve won three against the team with the best record in the WNBA.

Broader takeaways from the season series showed themselves throughout the game on Sunday. Multiple times, the Liberty played 20 seconds of solid defense, getting deflections and even forcing loose balls. Only, they rarely recovered those and too often, it led to a Minnesota make.

story of the 2nd quarter: Liberty playing much, much better D with crisp switching and active hands…but MIN is getting all the bounces:

“I can’t tell you how many times that happened tonight,” Stewart said. “They’re just confident in their teammates and I think that what we take from the fourth quarter is the way that we played, if we would have played that way the entire game, we don’t know what could have been.”

The Liberty can take lessons from their comeback

Candice Ward-Imagn Images

This isn’t the time of year for moral victories, so the Liberty didn’t leave Barclays Center satisfied with their game-changing fourth quarter. New York scored the first 10 points of the final period and made the Lynx look frazzled in a way they had not at any point in the previous three games between these teams.

Head coach Sandy Brondello brought out a triangle-and-two defense — something that rookie Leonie Fiebich admitted after the game the team hadn’t even practiced — and caught Minnesota off-guard.

Suddenly, it was the Lynx coughing up the ball or settling for bad shots. Stewart took over the game in the fourth, scoring 17. She finished with a season high 38 points and 18 rebounds.

Stewart and the reserves — particularly Nyara Sabally —keyed the Liberty’s comeback. They had simply dug themselves too deep of a hole, trailing by 24 at the start of the fourth quarter.

Jonquel Jones, who has averaged just 5.3 points in the team’s losses to the Lynx this season (14.6 overall), recognized Sabally in the locker room after the game as someone who stepped up when many of the starters did not.

To a player, the Liberty praised the Lynx’ discipline and precision on defense. They even described it using the same words they use to describe themselves when things are going well.

“They’re aggressive. They’re on a string. They help the helper,” Betnijah Laney-Hamilton said, repeating the principles the Liberty coaching staff has preached all year.

Fiebich added that it’s better for this to happen now than next week when the playoffs start. Sabrina Ionescu agreed.

“It’s a blessing in disguise sometimes,” she said. “To get punched in the mouth and have to be able to respond and understand what it takes to beat a team that’s as good as they are.”

In reality, however, it shouldn’t need to happen to a team that is 31-7 and made the WNBA Finals last year. But it did. And the Liberty have no choice but to move forward.

A different kind of challenge awaits in the final two games of the regular season. Still one win away from clinching the 1 seed, the Liberty will finish with two games against teams fighting for their playoff lives: the Washington Mystics on Tuesday and Atlanta Dream on Thursday. It’s likely New York will face one of those two teams in the first round of the playoffs.

The Mystics and Dream have essentially been playing playoff games for weeks now. Another lapse in intensity from the Liberty could mean their first loss of the season against one of those two.