Bulls-Hawks
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Then they took a weekend getaway to Atlanta, stopped in to see Ted and Jane and, as Michael Jordan put it at the end of the weekend, "We found ourselves in the midst of the playoffs a little bit.''

So much for the great demise of the Chicago Bulls.

Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and everybody else take note: You ain't getting off so easy.

Michael Jordan, left, knew better than to panic.

After back-to-back wins in the Omni, the Bulls are still with us and are going to be hanging around the NBA playoffs a few more weeks. Granted, they're still not in championship form. But who knows, with any help from Dennis Rodman, a no-show thus far in the Hawk series, they might even go on to win their fifth title.

Shocking, I know. It was just five days ago when the roof fell in on the United Center after the Bulls lost at home for only the fifth time in 96 games. Panic was so great the Red Cross was put on disaster alert.

Remember?

"Unless we begin to do the things we've done all season, when we won 69 ball games, we're not going to win another game this series,'' said Scottie Pippen, sounding the panic alarm after the 103-95 defeat in Game 2.

"I could see this coming," Pippen said. "I thought we could break out of this in one game and turn it around. But it got worse, to tell you the truth. We better come out to play. If not, we're going to have a short vacation.''

He meant a long vacation. To even bring up any kind of vacation for the Bulls before late June used to be mind-boggling. But not the way things had been going during the postseason. They won their first four playoff games, but all were life-and-death struggles.

It even took one classic 55-point performance from Jordan to beat back the eighth-seeded Bullets at home, for gosh sakes!

They weren't just being pushed to the limit by inferior competition; they were starting to bicker amongst themselves, too. Pippen and Jordan took Rodman to task after the loss for expending all his energy on officials and not loose balls.

Scottie Pippen (33) voiced displeasure with Dennis Rodman after Game 2.

"We've got to avoid the technical fouls Dennis is getting,'' Pippen said. "He's got to play the game and stop waiting for the fans to give him a lift.

"It's been building. It's at a point now where Dennis has to play his way out of whatever downswing he's on. We need a lift from him. If he's not going to lead us in rebounding, don't lead us in technical fouls. We don't need those.''

They didn't need other distractions that were threatening their reign. Vice president Jerry Krause reportedly sent films to one Tim Floyd of Ames, Iowa, presumably to get him ready for Phil Jackson's job. Jackson had talked to Golden State about their vacancy.

And Jordan was busy trying to find both Mookie Blaylock and that team Jordan used to play for that steamrolled through the NBA as recently as early March.

But what Jordan didn't go looking for was the panic button.

"So after one loss, the series is over?'' Jordan said. "We lost one game. So what?''

To his credit, Jordan was looking at the big picture. Yes, the Bulls were in some sort of funk. But it wasn't as if they were playing with a full deck. Rodman and Toni Kukoc are still not nearly recovered from injuries that KO'd each from a quarter of the season. The defense was low on energy, vulnerable in the post. Jordan was struggling with his jumper, perhaps a sign of fatigue from another iron-man regular-season.

Those elements were making the Bulls highly vulnerable, but it's not as if they weren't correctable. But we had become accustomed to seeing the Bulls at their untouchable best. Not this version.

"What the public and media expects is what they've seen in the past -- us blowing out teams and dominating teams. And it's not happening right now,'' Jordan said. "I believe we will win the championship. It might take more games than people anticipated. But it's not at a point where you push the panic button and say, 'The Chicago Bulls will not win the championship.'

A positive contribution from Rodman, right, could propel Chicago to another title.

"I'm not ready to push the panic button, and I advise you guys not to do that, either. In all the years we won the championship, we never went undefeated. Go back and look at the records. We lost games every year. So I don't think we should bury ourselves and say this series is over.''

After what happened in Atlanta, you can say it's over. Over for the Hawks. The Bulls played in the Omni over a 28-hour span as if they were desperate.

"We had to step up our defense,'' said Jackson.

Did they ever. That was a clinic Ted and Jane witnessed from the courtside chairs. From the third quarter of Game 3 until the fourth quarter of Game 4, the Bulls surrendered only 81 points. That's a paltry 16 points per quarter. The 28 points they yielded in the second half of Game 3 tied for the second fewest in NBA playoff history.

They forced the Hawks, who won 36 home games by an average of 10 points per game, to shoot 36.4 percent and 30.9 percent. They attacked the Big Three -- Blaylock, Steve Smith and Christian Laettner -- and held them to a combined 89 points on 26-for-91 shooting for the weekend, after the three had totaled 71 in Game 2.

"Incredible,'' Hawks coach Lenny Wilkens said of his team's wretched performances.

Incredibly bad, for the Hawks. But not for the Bulls. They handled the first gut-check of the postseason like true champs.

"We all know defense wins you titles,'' Jackson said.

The Bulls also know that any time a team repeats, it's usually a rockier road the second time around. When the Lakers became the first team to successfully repeat since the Celtics of the '60s, they went from three losses in '87 to nine in '88.

When the Pistons repeated, they went from only two losses in the '89 postseason to five in '90. Even the Bulls struggled more the second time around. They lost only two playoff games in 1991. But then they dropped seven the next season. So what? In all those instances, they all still got the required 15 wins.

Jordan hasn't lost sight of that. More than once, he has reminded everyone that the Bulls haven't shown the same hunger of the teams that are trying to win their first title. But the Bulls showed the hunger to defend their championship in Atlanta.

"Our attitude coming in this weekend was, we're not going to go 15-0 in the playoffs,'' Jordan said. ''You're gonna lose some games. We said, 'Let's just get focused and start to play the way we're capable of playing.'

"There were a lot of doubters out there, and we created the whole doubting atmosphere by the way we played our first five games. To some degree, we had to re-establish ourselves once again.''

They did -- and everybody else had better take note.

Mitch Lawrence, who covers the NBA for the New York Daily News, is a regular contributor ESPNET SportsZone.