Outside the Quicken Loans Arena his fans were quiet in the minutes after the Cavaliers' 103-82 loss in Game 4 of the NBA Finals Thursday night. Drums were beating on the sidewalks, music was blaring from the bars, but they -- thousands of them -- were keeping their thoughts to themselves as they wondered how much more could be asked of LeBron.

The Golden State Warriors have regained home-court advantage in what is now a three-game miniseries for the championship. They have dominated these last eight months with the reigning Kia MVP, the league's deepest bench, the most wins and the highest-rated defense and offense in the NBA. And yet they are not the story entering these final days.

Instead the plot spins around the world's greatest player, and not because he is invincible. What makes James more compelling than ever is his vulnerability. His best three teammates (Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love and Anderson Varejao) are gone and won't be back till next year. Would Michael Jordan (without Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Ron Harper) or Magic Johnson (sans Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy and Byron Scott) or Larry Bird (minus Kevin McHale, Robert Parish and Dennis Johnson/Danny Ainge) be two wins away from the championship under similar excruciating circumstances?

"This stuff is hard," Heat president Pat Riley had been saying one year ago in a veiled reference to James' impending free agency. "And you got to stay together, if you've got the guts. And you don't find the first door and run out of it."

James has had little to say in response to the implied criticism. His play has been his reply. His guts are being revealed.

The four teammates who have opened each Finals game alongside him have been coming off the bench for 45 percent of their regular-season careers. James has started more NBA games than the rest of the Cavs' current seven-man rotation combined. He is leading them further into the playoffs than any group of role players has ever been led in the modern day. And so his fans find themselves hoping, reaching and daring to anticipate an outcome that should not be possible.

"I don't really get involved in it, the whole thing," James was saying early Friday morning of Cleveland's overwhelming desire to win its first major team title since 1964 (Cleveland Browns).

"I understand how important this city is and what I mean to this city and what our team means to the city ... but I don't get caught up into it. I just go out and play my game."

The only way to help them is for him to not behave like them. He can't focus on their past, or the high odds of losing after so many injuries. And so he remains oblivious to how much he suddenly has in common with these same desperate fans who were booing him not so long ago.

Warriors refuse to be bullied

The Warriors were not as hungry as LeBron's Cavaliers through the first three games of The Finals -- they admitted so themselves. But it was also true that their style was suppressing their ambition. It was as if they were gasping for air, so tightly were they being guarded by LeBron and his underdogs.

The Warriors coach Steve Kerr responded in kind: If Cleveland was going to go all-in with its physically-domineering defense, then Golden State would double-down on its own strengths. They'd go smaller and quicker, replacing center Andrew Bogut with swingman Andre Iguodala, and they'd go deeper into their bench, too, by resuscitating David Lee's playmaking around the basket.

It must be nice to be young and healthy.

"As far as lineup changes," said James, "we don't have many different lineup changes we can actually go to."

The two most compelling matchups have both revolved around LeBron.

For all of the Warriors' speed and skill, it was Iguodala's ability to confront James physically that kept the Cavaliers from doing even more damage in the first three games. Iguodala was a Pac-12 star from Arizona who was hardened and defined by his early NBA years with the Philadelphia 76ers, where he was booed by his own demanding fans, and where his attempts to do everything well -- on defense especially -- were viewed as never quite good enough.

He came into these Finals with a better idea of what the Warriors were up against than any of his teammates. Iguodala stood his ground defensively, in spite of LeBron's superior size and strength, and he made big shots and attacked nonstop at both ends until, on Thursday, he noticed that his teammates were finally catching up to his intensity.

That matchup with Iguodala has been as real as a bruise. The other rivalry is with Stephen Curry -- who became MVP at LeBron's expense -- and it is a matchup of ideology.

Shift in mindset for LeBron

Curry looks almost too small to dominate, while LeBron has always been overpowering. Curry's Warriors sprint and spread the floor and shoot threes; which has forced LeBron, more so than ever in his career, to play to his size rather than his speed.

It used to be that LeBron was the one to punish sloppy opponents by dunking their turnovers. But that is Curry's job now. Curry and his teammates are athletically explosive, while LeBron, at 30, with a dozen years of high-minutes mileage, is the one walking it up the court, keeping his rhythm with the the ticking clock, recognizing that his depleted team can't keep up.

Bird came into the league as a runner who realized he had to slow the pace against Johnson. Then Magic slowed his game against Jordan, who in turn became ever more dependent on turnaround jumpers from the post. This same trend now is forced upon LeBron.

In this series it has been striking to see the phenom, the first big man to face the basket with his mix of athleticism and skill, turning himself now into a traditional postseason player. He's slowing the tempo, backing himself into the paint, feeding 7-foot-1 Timofey Mozgov and 6-foot-9 Tristan Thompson, and even conserving his own energy with soft efficient dunks that he would have been slamming a few years ago. All of this is the result of James being asked to do so much.

After all of these years of envisioning his potential, we are seeing LeBron realize it in full. He is doing more for his team than anyone else in memory has done. In so doing he is approaching his ceiling. This is the first year that he has not been invulnerable to injury or fatigue.

Even as LeBron plays a superhuman role for his team, he appears more than ever to be human. His best efforts may not be quite good enough. In other words, welcome to Cleveland.

'Trying to make that push'

"I gassed out," James was saying. "I was pretty much gassed either from driving, creating opportunities for my teammates, getting to the free throw line, getting offensive glass, just trying to make that push."

A third-quarter run had pulled the Cavs within 76-70 as James began the fourth quarter on the bench. From there he watched his teammates fail to create a single decent shot without him. A half-dozen healthy Cavaliers players, 20,000-plus fans in the arena and hundreds of thousands more gathered around TVs outside -- they were all waiting for him to do something.

When the deficit swelled to 10 and coach David Blatt called timeout two minutes into the fourth quarter, LeBron stood just enough to hop three or four seats down the bench as he waited for his teammates to join him for the huddle.

He was coming back in but by then it was too late. The Warriors were on their way. The audience would begin to flee the arena with 3:33 to go.

"I don't have any comment about it," James said of the early leaving fans. "I mean, I came out of the game as well early. So we were on the same page."

A fresh semi-circle of stitches accompanied the headache he suffered from a head-first spill into a TV camera in the second quarter. He was exhausted, his body was sore and a cross-country flight awaited. And yet he was smiling and joking and finding perspective from his former rivalry with the Celtics, when they were the old champs and he was the young, unfulfilled challenger.

His Heat had been facing elimination in the 2012 Eastern Conference finals when James generated 45 points and 15 rebounds on the road in Game 6 of that series on his way to winning his first NBA championship.

"Game 5 at Golden State is not that big," he said with a shrug, "when it comes to going to Boston, and you lose multiple times in that arena, and the franchise that I was with at the time had never won a playoff game in Boston. Now that's pretty challenging. So I've been through a little bit in my pretty cool career."

It was hard on James to leave Cleveland, and he was punished for it. It has not been easy to come back either. He is being asked to do more than any star should claim to provide. The world's greatest player is the underdog, but then he knew what he was getting himself into. Being from here, this was his destiny.

Ian Thomsen has covered the NBA since 2000. You can e-mail him here or follow him on Twitter.

The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Turner Broadcasting.