It’s not about me, it’s about us.

For a moment, when he burst into the open court alone, it looked like Chris Paul was thinking about tipping it in. It would have been an emphatic final statement on the series, the play to cap the complete dominance his Phoenix Suns demonstrated throughout.

But there were still 3 three minutes left in the game, and even with an 11-point lead, Paul still wasn’t thinking ahead.

“You try to stay in the moment,” he said. “My teammates will tell you, there were 18 seconds on the clock and I was still in control of the situation. That’s just the way I am.”

Even with league MVP Nikola Jokic ejected in the third quarter, Paul would extend that calm to the end of the game, in which the Suns completed their sweep over the Denver Nuggets 125-118 on Sunday night to advance to the Western Conference finals.

“The emotions are happy, grateful, tired, relieved,” Suns coach Monty Williams said. “It’s one of those moments for me that, quite frankly, I never thought I’d have the opportunity to experience. For me, I have a level of gratitude that I can’t even explain.”

It’s the first time in Paul’s career that he’s completed a sweep in a playoff series, something he had in mind and something he let his teammates know before the game.

“We were excited,” Suns guard Devin Booker said of the postgame atmosphere. “Chris was saying before the game that he’d never swept anybody, he’d never beat anybody 4-0. I don’t know when was the last time the Suns were in the Western Conference Finals, but tonight is one of the nights where we celebrate at home and then wake up tomorrow, we’re on the Clippers or Utah.”

To answer Booker’s question, the last time the Suns were in the conference finals: the 2009-10 season, when Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers defeated Steve Nash and the Suns in six games. They advanced for the first time in more than a decade in style, dominating the series from start to finish with an average margin of victory of 15.7 points.

It’s the second time Paul has been to the conference finals, the last time being in 2018 when he was a member of the Rockets and missed Games 6 and 7 due to a hamstring injury as Houston fell in seven games to the Golden State Warriors.

Now, he’s four wins away from his first Finals appearance.

“A lot of stuff, I haven’t had a lot of time to process it yet,” Paul said. “But I’m going to get on the bus and, first and foremost, call my kids.”

Paul scored 37 points on 14-of-19 shooting in the Game 4 clincher, capping off a series that was nothing short of magnificent. For the 36-year-old future Hall of Famer, he finished the series averaging 25.5 points on 61.8% shooting, 58% from 3, 100% from the free throw line, plus an absurd 41-to-5 assist-to-turnover ratio.

“A couple of years ago, I was being written off. ‘You can’t do this.’ It’s not about me, it’s about us,” Paul said on the court after the game. “It shows what you can do when you come together as a team. We have a great team out there and it’s a lot of fun to be a part of.”

Throughout the season, Paul’s control of the game was on display and his influence on the young Suns was clear as he asserted himself in key moments to spark scoring. He was particularly brilliant in the mid-range, taking advantage of the NBA’s inefficient scoring to split the Nuggets’ coverage scheme. In Game 4, he hit 10 mid-range shots, the most in his career (playoffs or regular season).

After dispatching the defending champion Lakers in six games, the Nuggets posed a new challenge with the league MVP and a contrasting style. But with young big man Deandre Ayton and a promising cast of supporting players around Paul and Booker, the Suns always seemed up to the task.

Paul shared a long, emotional embrace with Williams after the game on the court. Their relationship goes back a decade, with Williams coaching Paul in New Orleans for one season in 2010-11. Paul and Williams remained close even when they went their separate ways, and after tragedy struck Williams in 2016 when his wife Ingrid was killed in a car accident, Paul offered support.

“The darkest time of my life, Chris was there,” Williams said. “One of the highlights of my career, he’s there.”

Since their run more than a decade ago under Mike D’Antoni and the Seven Seconds or Less revolution, the Suns have largely disappeared from Western contention. They were a consistent staple in the lottery, but finally found some momentum on the NBA bubble last summer, posting an 8-0 record and nearly making an improbable run to the play-in game