Cynics and other non-believers like to scoff that all you really have to watch is the last two minutes of a pro basketball game. And in a sense they do have a point, albeit a tiny one. After all, many if not all games are decided in two minutes. But the thing is, it’s not always the last two, so if you only tune in for them you may have already missed the decisive ones.

Friday night’s game, for instance, was indeed decided in two minutes, but if you waited until the last two to watch you were some seven minutes late to catch Eddie House’s tide-turning heroics. From 9:21 to 7:21 in the fourth period, House went on a personal 9-0 run against the Nuggets to push a very shaky one-point lead (like there’s any other kind) back to a solid 10.

House’s overall statistics, while decent enough, don’t begin to measure the impact his lethal bursts can have. You look at his line in this one, for instance, and you see that he just had a pretty nice game with 12 points on 5-of-12 shooting off the bench in 17 minutes. And his overall stats on the season (eight points a game and 37 percent on threes) don’t exactly boggle the mind either. But Coach Mike D'Antoni offers a much more accurate appraisal when he says, “We’ve got nine wins and Eddie has three saves.”

The crowd offered its own assessment with a standing ovation when House departed with 4:49 to play. And even before then they were chanting, “Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!” every time the Suns brought the ball back down the floor.

He won’t always be this hot, of course. Like many NBA sharpshooters, there will be nights when he hits the bullseye and nights when he can’t even hit the bull, but it’s a great luxury to have a player on your bench with the potential to deliver instant points.

In fact, Friday night it was a downright necessity, because before Eddie heated up, the Suns had blown a 17-point lead, their offense had lapsed into a semi-coma and they very much bore the look of a team coming down the stretch on a wing and a prayer.

So House’s outburst did indeed “save” the game. But if you’re looking to who got the “win,” that’s at the discretion of the official scorer, who in this column is me, and I’m giving it to Kurt Thomas. And while I’m at it, I’m crediting Shawn Marion with a “hold.” (Once I get on a baseball kick it’s like I don’t know when to stop). Thomas had 16 rebounds, 16 points and four blocked shots in his best game as a Sun, and Marion had one of his average games as a Sun with 22 points, 11 boards, three blocks and a little booster burst of his own at the start of the fourth period. All of the above was necessary to overcome a huge night by Marcus Camby (20 rebounds, 33 points).

The bottom line: The Suns have now won five straight games and held the opposition under 100 in six straight, and 7-of-8.

The caveat: It must be duly noted that the Suns are in an extremely soft patch of schedule, what with a mess of home games, many against teams that are either not very good and/or not very healthy. So it certainly behooves them to squirrel away a few nuts now, so to speak, against the long hard winter that looms ahead.

The good news: They’re doing it!