By WINNIE HU

LBANY, June 23 — It is generally understood that if a member of Albany's all-powerful troika of Gov. George E. Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno comes out against a potential deal, it is dead on arrival.

But a deal can die even when everyone agrees to it.

That was the case last week with one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation to come along in years. The governor and the two legislative leaders struck an 11th-hour agreement to completely restructure the way that the state pays for the cleanup of toxic waste dumps. The plan also would have encouraged the redevelopment of abandoned industrial sites, known as brownfields, which blight urban landscapes.

For more than two years, the Democratic-controlled Assembly and the Republican-led Senate have been at odds over how rigorous to make the cleanup standards and have failed to pass any laws at all. What resulted was a textbook case of Albany dysfunction: the state Superfund program literally ran out of money in March 2001, and thousands of toxic sites languished.

But in the final hours of this year's session, Albany's power triumvirate finally worked out a compromise in a marathon bargaining session that kept legislative aides up for 40 hours straight. It was supposed to be passed in bill form before the Legislature officially adjourned for the summer; indeed, all three men emerged from the closed-door session to reaffirm that a deal was at hand.

Only it never happened.

While the reasons remain somewhat of a mystery, Mr. Pataki, Mr. Bruno and Mr. Silver signed off on the brownfields issue sometime on Thursday — the last scheduled day of session — but then the Senate passed one version of it in the wee hours of Friday morning, and the Assembly passed a different version about 18 hours later.

The deal was never sealed because the Legislature, unlike Congress, does not have an automatic procedure to resolve conflicting bills. For a bill to become law, the Assembly and Senate must pass the same version. Until then, there are just two different bills and plenty of filing cabinets in the Capitol filled with such near misses.

"To get any good legislation passed in Albany, it's kind of like watching `The Perils of Pauline,' " said Blair Horner, a longtime lobbyist for the New York Public Interest Research Group. "At every juncture, there's a hairpin turn. And at times, it feels like the train is running out of control."

Aides for Albany's political leaders insisted today that there remained a three-way agreement on brownfields, but the Senate, for one, is not expected to reconvene until fall at the earliest. That leaves plenty of time for industry groups and other opponents to try to derail the deal.

"Once we digest the 108 pages of bill text, we're going to communicate what we think about it," said Ken Pokalsky, the director of environmental programs for the Business Council of New York State.

In many respects, the glitch in the brownfields deal has as much to do with the personalities behind it as with anything else. Mr. Bruno can be obsessive about keeping to a schedule, to the point of fining senators for showing up late. Governor Pataki and Mr. Silver, on the other hand, apparently have no such compulsion. Both are frequently late to their own news conferences.

While how it actually happened is a matter of debate, the sequence of events on that final day — and night — of the session is a matter of record. Sometime after the deal on brownfields was struck, Mr. Bruno and his colleagues grew tired of waiting for Mr. Silver to put the finishing touches on the bill.

So they ordered their own version of the bill printed early Friday and, with support from the governor, quickly passed it. The senators then filed out of their chamber around 5:30 a.m., a mere 20 minutes before the Assembly's version of the bill surfaced. It was that bill that the Assembly later passed.

Since then, there has been no shortage of theories offered by lobbyists and aides for the delay in the final bill. One theory has it that the bill was entrusted to a junior staff member who fell asleep while waiting for it to be printed. Another theory paints a chaotic scene caused by a mix-up in bill numbers.

And, of course, there is the Senate theory. "The Assembly kept delaying the printing of the bill by raising technical concerns simply to keep us in town," said John McArdle, a spokesman for Mr. Bruno.

Mr. Silver and his aides denied that charge, saying there were complicated issues that required time.

Meanwhile, many environmentalists long accustomed to such twists and turns in Albany politics have already shaken off their disappointment.

"If that was the end of the story, then we'd all be miserable, but that's not where it ended," said Jeff Jones, a spokesman for Environmental Advocates, which has lobbied for the brownfields deal. "We see the finish line, but the problem is, we're stuck in time. We hope nothing happens between now and the fall to mess up the deal."