A championship in hand, the Miami Heat faces a new challenge: establishing a dynasty, both on the court and financially. In professional sports, champions rise and fall, only to be quickly forgotten. Quick: Who won the World Series two years ago? But some teams obtain gold-standard status through sustained performance and national cachet. (Think Lakers, Yankees, Celtics and Patriots). It carries them past one year’s triumph or disappointing season to link the team’s name to a certain exalted era. A question for the Heat: Will the franchise be the Miami Dolphins of the 1970s (prolonged excellence) or the Florida Marlins of the 1990s? “It could be like when the Heat won [the championship] last time. Demand for tickets went way down, because the thrill of the chase was gone,’’ said Miami ticket broker Michael Lipman. “Or, they could be like the old Bulls and Lakers, and become a dynasty. Brokers made millions on those teams.” The time between now and next year’s playoffs will test the staying power of Heatmania. For fans, a question is whether they will have to pay even more for seats in an arena that already charges some of the league’s top prices. The Heat’s bottom line also gets particular attention in cash-strapped Miami-Dade County, which has yet to collect any money in a profit-sharing deal with the team now playing its 12th season in the tax-subsidized arena. For sure, the Heat’s second championship in six years will spark a windfall for the team. But the Heat’s championship victory over Oklahoma City offers a particularly tricky case, experts said, given the high expectations that followed LeBron James’ arrival in 2010 and the sense of destiny denied when the team lost last year’s finals to Dallas. According to Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of professional sports teams, the Miami Heat saw its value increase from $363 million to $457 million since 2010, when James and Chris Bosh joined Dwyane Wade as the Heat’s so-called Three Kings. Under Forbes’ formula, the Heat is the sixth most valuable NBA franchise, behind, in order, the Lakers, Knicks, Bulls, Celtics and Mavericks. The 26 percent spike in the wake of the LeBron signing raises a question: How much higher can it go? “This will be a more modest increase,” said Patrick Rishe, a sports business analyst and economics professor at Webster University. “The arena has been pretty full, and if local media deals and sponsorships are locked in for a few years, this lessens the size of the value spike.” Still, the Heat has gone from a team playing below its potential to reaching it — and matching the haughty prediction James made shortly after defecting from Cleveland that “not five, not six, not seven,” but even more championships would be his. OFFSEASON BUZZ David Samson, president of the Miami Marlins, said winning matters more financially than the hype surrounding a hot, newly assembled team — even one as grandiose as the Heat. “The offseason buzz is when you sign LeBron and Bosh. It ends quickly if the team doesn’t win,” said Samson, whose Marlins won the World Series in 2003. (Their first title, in 1997, was under different ownership.) “But when you win a title, you have a much longer-lasting, almost permanent buzz. The buzz that Miami had when they signed LeBron is nothing compared to the buzz they have now." On average, the NBA’s eight previous champions saw their value increase by 10 percent the following year, including the Heat’s 13 percent gain in 2006 to $409 million, according to Forbes rankings. In 2005, Shaquille O’Neal’s first year with the Heat, the county-owned AmericanAirlines Arena reported a 22 percent spike in revenue to $37 million. The championship season brought another 18 percent bump. But the next year — which brought a disappointing first-round playoff exit — saw only a 3 percent gain, followed by four years of wobbly results. (Those figures dipped in no small part due to a poor on-court product after O’Neal forced a trade out of town). Only when James signed in the summer of 2010 did revenues soar again — up 33 percent to a record $60 million. Miami averaged 19,935 people per regular-season game this season — or 102 percent of capacity. One way to value the Heat’s win this year is to consider the reverse: How would fans and sponsors react if the Heat blew another championship — especially given Miami’s reputation as a sports town with little patience with underachievers? “I have experienced the positives and negatives of fair-weather fandom since I am a native of Miami,” said Rick Horrow, host of Bloomberg Television’s Sportsfolio program and a key player in building the Heat’s original home in the Miami Arena. While another lost season might have soured Miami to the Three Kings, last week’s win secured their status. “The pedestal is firmly established for the Heat now,” said Horrow, president of Horrow Sports Ventures. The timing of contracts can play a large role in how much a team profits from that year’s championship. Fox’s television deal to air Heat games on its Sun Sports network expires in 2015, but reports emerged last week that the deal was being renegotiated for a higher price. Both Fox and the Heat deny those reports. STRONG POSITION Furthermore, the Heat typically sells premium season-ticket packages in three-year contracts. Unfortunately for the Heat, ticket broker Michael Lipman said Friday that the latest triumph happened to fall early in the current cycle. Still, Lipman said single-game and group ticket prices could rise some 10 percent next year. Sponsorship dollars also should be easier to come by, said sports lawyer Adam Chase of Washington, D.C.’s Dow Lohnes. “They’re in a pretty strong position,’’ Chase said of the Heat. “Think of all the sponsors who want to have their pictures taken with LeBron and the MVP trophy.” Even with the championship run, Heat executives say they do not expect this season’s revenues to top 2011’s, thanks to the shortened season caused by a labor dispute. That means the arena, operated by a company owned by Heat owner Micky Arison, likely will not pay Miami-Dade any rent for the championship season. In a letter to the Miami-Dade Inspector General’s Office, which investigated the lack of payments, Heat President Eric Woolworth suggested profits may increase enough soon for the county to share in some of the team’s Three Kings bounty. “Encouragingly, all of our business indicators are pointing up,’’ Woolworth wrote in the May 15 letter. “If we are able to maintain the current trajectory, it is possible that the county will see its first distribution [from the arena] sometime in the next several years.”  

Daniel Retzena shelled out roughly $225 for a face-value ticket in the rafters to Game 3 of the NBA Finals. But Retzena wasn’t in his seat Sunday night. He was home in Shavertown, Pa. So who was in his designated spot for tipoff? Me — and I got in the door for $147, a savings of nearly $80. And here’s the real kicker: I feel like I overpaid. Granted, I did better than Retzena — a 26-year-old freelance ticket broker who took a bath on his long-distance gamble. And I certainly didn’t spend as much as the Arabian sheikh who dropped at least $9,000 apiece for courtside seats. But with a little bit more patience, I could have gotten in the door Sunday for under $100. And, with the proper planning and a bit of luck, you can do the same for Tuesday’s Game 4 at AmericanAirlines Arena. I started out Sunday with a loose game plan: Take the $150 allowance granted by The Miami Herald and find a way into Heat-Thunder Game 3. Why $150? That was roughly the cost of a standing-room-only pass through Ticketmaster for those lucky enough to snag one before the event officially sold out. My editors had hoped this would be a story about haggling the price down with some street scalper in the minutes immediately before or after the game began. That’s the danger time for brokers, when anxiety builds over possibly getting stuck with expensive tickets that turn into worthless pieces of paper if unsold. And I tried to write that story. It just didn’t want to get written. I spent most of pregame walking some three miles around the AmericanAirlines Arena grounds, yet was not approached by a single person barking, “Need tickets?” Disclaimer: it’s illegal (not to mention risky) to buy or sell a ticket within 1,500 feet of the venue unless done through a licensed broker. But I couldn’t even find a scalper a full half-mile away from the arena. It seems the street hustler is yet another job eliminated by technology. Now, they either do it through professional brokers or websites such as StubHub.com. I paid a visit to the former at roughly 6:30 p.m. Sunday, chatting up Tickets of America owner Michael Lipman in his office an hour and a half before tipoff — just before the peak of his game-day rush. It was Lipman who sold the pricey courtside passes to the sheikh and who also made perhaps the most lucrative deal of the night: $19,500 per seat to a rap star whose name Lipman declined to disclose. “This is turning out to be one of the biggest tickets in Heat history,” said Lipman, nattily attired in a charcoal suit and a grey paisley shirt. “It rivals Game 7 of the Celtics series. My phone’s been blowing up.” Lipman said he expected to move roughly 75 percent of his total inventory for Game 3 Sunday, and acknowledged prices fall closer to the game you get. Still, he deals mostly in premium seats and had nothing under $200 when I left his shop, and so I kept searching. After another lap around downtown Miami, time began to grow short. I finally broke down and did what I should have all along: I pulled up the StubHub mobile app on my iPhone. I had monitored prices on the second-hand ticket website throughout the day, and they had steadily fallen because of a glut. At 10 a.m., the cheapest get-in was $160 (before fees), but that had dipped to as low as $75 by around 6 p.m. Problem was, I only wanted one seat, and finding one wasn’t easy. Those who owned multiple tickets by and large didn’t want to break them up. Finally, at 7:23 p.m., I found what I thought was the perfect opportunity: $120 (plus a hefty $27 in fees) for Section 417, Row 13, Seat 4. I pulled the trigger, and bought the ticket, which had originally belonged to Retzena. I know this because his name was conveniently (for my purposes at least, but surely not his) printed on the ticket. I hopped in a cab, and felt pretty good about myself as I arrived at the arena. My mood darkened when I, out of morbid curiosity, went back on StubHub to see where the prices stood 10 minutes before game time. They had absolutely collapsed, falling as low as $24. Let that marinate for a second: A seat for a sold-out, championship-round game was marked down by more than 80 percent. And it could have been yours, simply by knowing the right time to buy. In all, StubHub sold 4,203 tickets to Game 3, at over $500 a piece. That figure would have been even lower if not for the four courtsides the website sold for a combined $60,000. There’s no reason to think Game 4, which is also sold out at the box office, won’t be more of the same. As of Monday afternoon, roughly 2,400 tickets remained for Tuesday’s game, starting at $160 each. Short of an unexpected run on them overnight, there will be a similar backlog of inventory Tuesday. That means prices will likely again nose dive. My advice for bargain hunters who don’t care about sitting near Lil Wayne, but instead just want to get in the door without going broke: • Download StubHub’s mobile app so you can purchase remotely — and wait to get the best deals. • Consider licensed brokers such as Tickets of America, which are flexible with prices depending on demand. • Monitor the action throughout the day, but don’t commit outside of three hours before tipoff, unless the deal is really sweet or there are fewer than 400 passes left available (StubHub sold 270 tickets between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. Sunday). • If possible, get a seat. The standing-room only areas are about as big as a balcony on one of Micky Arison’s cruise ships. As I proved, chairs can be had cheaply. POSTSCRIPT The game was a blast, even though I had the Goodyear Blimp view. Sat three rows from the top next to a father and son, Brett and Blake Stern, who stayed until Miami had salted away the victory — even though it likely ended past rising fourth-grader Blake’s bedtime. The Sterns had paid face value for their two seats, plus $250 to join the Heat’s Priority Access club, which gives members first crack at tickets. I was embarrassed to admit what I spent on mine. On Monday, I decided to give Retzena a phone call in Pennsylvania to get his story. As I assumed, mine wasn’t the only ticket he bought purely as an investment opportunity. He slashed prices when it became clear he was asking too much. “All I can say is, you got lucky,” Retzena said with a chuckle, when asked about my sales price. “It’s like the stock market. But if the Heat wins Tuesday, I strongly believe that the prices for Game 5 [a potential series-clincher] will be high.” I, for one, will be watching Game 5 from home. No matter how great the deal, you can only talk The Herald into picking up the tab once.