T HINGS have a different feel in the sports bars of Las Vegas these past few nights.

In keeping with a place that relentlessly attacks the senses like no other, the taverns don't so much offer respite from the onslaught as ramp it up. As April heads towards May, it's play-off basketball that is boomed out nightly from wall-to-wall giant screens. But it doesn't quite feel the same as recent times.

There is a major part of the picture missing. For the first time in a long time, the Miami Heat, who made it all the way to the NBA finals in the past four seasons, haven't even qualified for the play-offs. The first campaign of the post-LeBron James era has been desperately disappointing. So much so that the most memorable and significant moment in the Heat's season had more to do with boxing than basketball.

On January 27, it was the team's American Airlines Arena that staged what most agree was the pivotal moment in the tortuous, near six-year journey to the most significant fight of this era. Making the most of a cancelled flight and an extra night in Miami, Manny Pacquiao made straight for the Heat's home. When he got there, he came face to face with Floyd Mayweather for the first time.

Even putting aside the stop-start chaotic courtship between Mayweather and Pacquiao, it seems remarkable that the two most dominant fighters of their generation, who have circled and shadowed one another through a raft of weight divisions and a host of mutual vanquished opponents, had never met.

Both camps insist the Miami meeting was coincidental. Both agree it was the defining exchange. The fighters spoke briefly but more significantly swapped phone numbers and Mayweather, six years after the super fight was first provisionally agreed upon but then dashed by his insistence on stricter Olympics-style drug testing of Pacquiao, made his move that night away from the glare of the American Airlines Arena.

So as we hurtle towards Saturday night's extravaganza of excess in the home of hype, as the world begins to focus its eyes on the MGM Grand, it is worth taking a moment to thank the Miami Heat. Their season may have been a disaster but they might just have helped save boxing.

There is no denying that the long march to this fight took on a deathly feel as the sport sat on life support. The brash blitz of the UFC has been impossible to ignore. It has won the hearts, the eyes and the wallets of millions, going from the hot, young upstart to the bona-fide challenger for dominance of the combat sport world.

How boxing so desperately needed the Mayweather-Pacquiao rivalry to be played out in the ring instead of the in-boxes of petulant promoters. Now it is here, it leaves us thinking what might have been. Saturday could have marked the deciding fight of an epic trilogy or even a fourth bout between two titanic pound-for-pounders. But it also provides cause for hope. As the staggering numbers surrounding the fight prove, boxing can still do the big ones better than most. Tickets for a fight that will generate almost a half a billion dollars are racing towards $200,000 a piece.

The deluge of figures has been relentless and yet what might still be the most remarkable number is the one that comes in brackets after Pacquiao's name. Not the 57 career wins but the five defeats. That the Philippines' most favourite son finds himself 12 rounds, or even one swing of his trademark wrecking ball left hand, away from a victory that would elevate him into the boxing pantheon is as astounding as any of the myriad nuggets of his incredible life story.

Three years ago, when Pacquiao was knocked unconscious by a sickening Juan Manuel Marquez blow, the prospect of seeing him opposite Mayweather appeared gone. It was a knock-out that dealt the then 33-year-old back-to-back defeats for the first time. For so many fighters it would have marked the end of the high line.

But Pacquiao is nothing if not unique. Like so many of his countrymen he is a basketball fanatic, making the Miami Heat moment all the more fitting. It may well be that his devotion to the court has helped frame his mentality when it comes to a blemished record. The legendary US high school basketball coach Morgan Wootten was a firm believer in the power of defeat, arguing: "You learn more from losing than winning. You learn how to keep going."

Mayweather, as proficient at rubbing people up the wrong way as he is a pugilist, pointed to his perfect 47-0 record last week as all the evidence needed to declare himself superior to Muhammad Ali. "I feel like I have done just as much in the sport as Ali," he said. "It is hard for a guy to be like me, still sharp at 38. No disrespect to Ali, but I feel like I am the best."

Where Mayweather knows only one way out of the ring - as the victor - his opponent has undoubtedly learned more from his less successful exits through the ropes. Pacquiao's first pro defeat, against a reluctant ring hand called Rustico Torrecampo in Manila 19 years ago, ended with the teenage Pacman carried from the ring by the host broadcaster's fight commentators. His second defeat came against a Thai fighter who went by the moniker Medgoen 3K Battery after changing his name for a sponsor's cash. These embarrassments gave way to determination and crucially a new discipline which he carried with him to the US and the relationship which transformed his career.

Mayweather's excesses and attitudes play perfectly into the good-versus-evil narrative that will speckle much of the build-up to Saturday. But so too does the fighter-trainer pairing of Pacquiao and Freddie Roach. It is one of sport's most heart-warming relationships, more father-son than fighter-trainer and arguably more father-son than Mayweather's relationship with his trainer - his father Floyd Snr.

It is a relationship built on belief and the three defeats Pacquiao has suffered since linking up with Roach, who battles a crippling strain of Parkinson's, have helped shape that unshakeable axis as much as their dozens of tremendous triumphs against adversity.

"Mayweather's career lacks that kind of over-the-brink experience," said Springs Toledo, the celebrated boxing historian. "Losses on a record are like Cindy Crawford's mole or Cary Grant's cleft chin. They add character."

Six years late, the fight that was to have saved boxing, is six days away. There's still time for more remarkable figures to be totted up in Las Vegas. For Roach and Pacquiao, however, the hope is that five defeats will not turn into six.