It all felt so familiar, but also like a premonition. It seemed so unscripted and messy, but so predictable, too.

Here’s what struck me as I watched the Warriors’ weird and weighty loss in Phoenix on Tuesday: When the end of this dynastic run comes, it will look a lot like what we witnessed at Footprint Center in this game. And when the end comes, officially and finally, we will remember this game as the time when the signs and cycles of the decline became impossible to ignore.

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The end will look exactly like this. Just this confused. Just this bitter. Just this tedious. Just this same thing, over and over, until this incredible run is over for good.

I don’t think a big trade is coming this season because the Warriors just don’t have enough pieces to put together something worthwhile. I don’t think the Warriors can do much other than make some rotation changes and hope for the best. I don’t think they should blow everything up out of rash impulse — they owe it to Stephen Curry to try to push this as far as it’ll go, even when it looks the bleakest. I think if there’s something major brewing, it’ll likely come next offseason. That might rekindle the dynasty, or it might not. But what we’re seeing now is the accumulation of a lot of inevitable things.

This is how the Warriors’ dynasty will end: Draymond Green ejected after another unnecessary and way-too-physical incident and maybe on his way to another suspension; Klay Thompson, Andrew Wiggins and Kevon Looney sitting on the bench after too many ineffective minutes; and Curry racing around just trying to make up for everything and everybody.

There have been similar separate doddering moments throughout the first part of this Warriors season, several times when we sat up and wondered whether the clock had run out on the dynasty. But on Tuesday, it was all there on national TV in a single, convenient two-and-a-half-hour collection. The old guys couldn’t do it. The young guys tried to bail them out but fell short. And Draymond is probably in trouble with the league again.

The loss dropped the Warriors to 10-13 and pushed them outside of even the Western Conference Play-In positions. But the numbers and the standings aren’t very significant, at least not now. It’s not about the Warriors’ young players getting extra minutes and playing well enough to make this a tight game at the end. It’s not even about what Steve Kerr and Mike Dunleavy Jr. can do to tweak the lineup and rotation.

Hey, maybe Kerr will decide to give much more time to Jonathan Kuminga, Moses Moody, Brandin Podziemski and Trayce Jackson-Davis, and maybe that all nudges the Warriors into relevance this season. Or maybe Draymond, Klay, Wiggins and Looney will power back into their old selves after being overdue for many weeks.

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I’m not saying that the dynasty is already over. You never know what proven champions can summon in the darkest moments, and I have made a habit of never discounting the chances of Curry, Klay and Draymond pulling off something quite surprising and magical, the way they did less than two years ago.

They’re too proud and have accomplished too much to let it go easily. Honestly, marching out gracefully wouldn’t suit a group that has won so much and battled so fiercely over this last decade. The Warriors will bite and claw through this. They will fight until the final bell, and then they will fight some more. In many ways, it’s commendable. It’s what you expect out of four-time champions.

But on Tuesday, there was no poetry to this, only profound frustration and obvious decline. Also, the exasperation of watching Draymond’s ejection for a Flagrant 2 foul when he tried to sell a foul by whipping around and slamming his hand into the face of the Suns’ Jusuf Nurkić. Draymond has been involved with these kinds of incidents throughout his career, but if he gets suspended for this, it’ll be his second suspension already this season, and that comes after he was suspended for a playoff game last season.

And, as Kerr and Curry emphasized after the game, they need him in the games more than ever now. They didn’t say it, but I will: If the Warriors can’t count on Klay, Wiggins and Looney anymore, the last thing Draymond can do is continue to make himself ineligible for games. But he keeps doing it. At the start of a four-year contract given to him a few months after he punched Jordan Poole during practice, at 33, at a precarious time when his team needs him on the court, Draymond keeps doing this.

Poole was traded and Draymond got $100 million, which only proved Draymond’s essential status with this franchise. But for it to work this season and beyond, Draymond has to continue to play well and to stay on the court. And he keeps doing this.

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Draymond has played in 15 games this season. He’s been ejected in three of them. He’s been suspended for five other games and could be facing more after this incident. Plus, this Flagrant 2 foul raises his flagrant point total to four this season. He’ll receive a one-game suspension if and when he accrues two more points during the rest of the regular season. That’s above and beyond anything the league hands down for this incident, and the suspensions keep coming with each additional two points after that.

What can be said to Draymond to stop this?

“Uhh, we’ll keep working,” Kerr said.

The Warriors have been eternally patient with Draymond. They’ll continue to be patient with him. He’s paid them back plenty for their patience over the years. But if he misses many more games this season, they’ll be worse for it. The Warriors’ best lineup might be Draymond at center with Kuminga at power forward and either Wiggins, Klay or Moody at small forward, and Curry playing alongside either Chris Paul or Podziemski. As always, Draymond’s versatility is the key to that kind of creative lineup. Which is meaningless if he’s suspended or ejected.

The Warriors had a chance to push the reset button last offseason when Draymond hit free agency. They could’ve held onto Poole and let Draymond go. But the Warriors were never going to pick Poole over Draymond. There was too much to lose if they let Draymond walk only a year after he helped them to their fourth title of this era.

And the Game 7 victory over Sacramento in the first round was their proof of concept. So they traded Poole for Paul and gave themselves the out of Paul’s non-guaranteed contract for next season. So they have financial options, including the possibility of letting Klay walk as a free agent, also. But they really don’t have personnel options this season other than cutting down the minutes for Klay, Wiggins and Looney and moving Kuminga, Podziemski and Moody into larger roles.

Tuesday also felt like a watershed moment because Kerr, who has been so patient with Klay, Wiggins and Looney, finally just threw up his arms and went with the younger players in those spots for most of the game after the veteran starting lineup put up a dud again in the opening minutes. Who knows if Kerr will make major permanent lineup changes, but he crossed a big threshold in this game by conceding that he had to try something different.

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“I just felt like tonight I had to play the guys who were playing the best,” Kerr said when asked about benching Wiggins to start the third quarter (Looney also was benched at that point). “I’ve been really patient and trying to get everybody organized into groups and give guys freedom and space. But tonight did not feel like a night to have a lot of patience. We needed some urgency, and that’s why I made the move.”

The Warriors need urgency, but they’re a bit stuck, too. They made their moves last offseason. They weren’t bad moves. I mean, where would they be right now without CP3, Podziemski and Dario Šarić and if they’d traded Kuminga or Moody? They did everything they could to keep this going. They just wanted to give their foundational guys one more chance. But there was always going to be an end to this, and Tuesday was a loud preview for what it’ll be like.

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(Top photo of Draymond Green: Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)

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