I think the incident woke the assailants up a little and they realized the absurdity of their behavior. Some times standing up is all it takes.Aaah! Beat me to it!
I will say this....without meaning any disrespect (truly!) to you DB, I will agree that you were lucky over your TKD being street effective. Thankfully, you were not hurt or worse. From my point of view, anytime you land with your most powerful techniques (kicks) and all that happens is they ask "why did you kick me?" or come at you a few more times, you were not effective at all. Landing Kicks should get better results than that. From my experiences, seeing the above happen....bad results happened to the defender. You were very VERY fortunate.
Sean