If you want to find another basketball year like this one in New York, you probably have to go all the way back to 1974, when one of the teams was playing with a slick red, white and blue ball and the other was finishing its run as the NBA "Fantasticks," a long-running smash taking its final curtain calls.
Thirty-nine years ago the defending-champion Knicks were stealing one last Game 7 off the Bullets (making that five times in six series) before finally handing the NBA's baton back to the Celtics in what turned out to be the final stand for Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere, and one of the last hurrahs for everyone else, for Clyde and Pearl, for Dollar Bill and Jerry Lucas, for all of them.
On May 10, 1974 — exactly a year to the day after the Knicks had beaten the Lakers to win their second NBA title — the Nets welcomed the Utah Stars to Nassau Coliseum and it may well have been the greatest night of basketball the old barnyard on Hempstead Turnpike ever had. Every seat was occupied, all 15,934 of them. Julius Erving, Larry Kenon and Billy Paultz — Dr. J, Mr. K and the Whopper — combined for 63 points, and the Nets ran the Stars out of the building, 111-100 for the ABA championship.
"This is the happiest moment I've ever had in basketball," Nets coach Kevin Loughery announced at game's end, before dousing himself with a full bottle of champagne.
PHOTOS: BEST PLAYOFF MOMENTS
Thirty-nine years we've waited for an encore. The Knicks fell into rapid decline, rose for a splendid decade in the '90s, collapsed again. The Nets added a second ABA title two years later in the league's final season, but soon became a vagabond laughingstock, losing buckets of games in Uniondale and Piscataway and East Rutherford and Newark.
The Knicks and Nets combined for 104 wins in '74, and 39 years later they've teamed up for 103, in their first year as fellow New Yorkers, as borough neighbors separated by three bridges and one tunnel and the narrow ambitions of teams who know they are good enough to build special journeys.
"It's been a long road, a long roller coaster," Knicks coach Mike Woodson said yesterday, on the first day of the second season, his team gathering in Westchester County to begin preparation for the Celtics, whom they'll host at Madison Square Garden tomorrow. "We hung on as a team and put ourselves in the best position we possibly could. Despite our injuries, the fact that we are committed, we overcame."
Said interim coach P.J. Carlesimo, whose Nets assembled in North Jersey to start practicing for the Bulls, whom they'll host at Barclays Center tomorrow night: "That's the trick of the playoffs. You can't pretend it's not more important than what's preceded it, and you can't pretend each game isn't important."
We had an inkling that we could be in for something special even before the season began, both teams building rosters that were intriguing in October and interesting in November and became awfully damned enjoyable to watch across most of the months between then and now.
They were supposed to face each other right away in the season opener, but an interloper named Sandy had something to say about that. Still, the four times they did play — all of them, oddly, in the season's first half — fulfilled every hope we might've had for the relationship between Manhattan and Brooklyn, three of the games nail-biters, one of them an overtime classic, one decided because of a late Jason Kidd 3-pointer in Brooklyn, one when Joe Johnson kicked a plug out of the Garden wall in the final seconds.
It was then we could start dreaming about what a Knicks-Nets playoff series will sound like some year, even if it's likely not to be this year, not with the Heat probably awaiting the Nets if they squeeze by the Bulls. Of course if it did happen this year, that would mean they would both be in the conference finals, best-of-seven to make it to the Finals, and …
And that's getting way ahead of ourselves.
"We aren't looking past this series, or past Game 1, not at all," Carmelo Anthony insisted. "We aren't thinking about Miami. We'll let Milwaukee deal with that problem. We have a big enough task of our own."
Still … this is what the long NBA season is supposed to yield. Hope. Energy. Passion. And for the first time, all of that will be contained within the boroughs.
"The crowd will be different, the NBA floor is going to be different, as soon as you walk in that arena, it's going to be totally different," Nets forward Reggie Evans said. "The feeling, just the rush of what's coming into you …
"Man," he said.
Man, indeed. Tomorrow it starts. Tomorrow it crests. Tomorrow we get dueling basketball stories flanking the East River, and for as long as it lasts we will be a basketball city — the basketball city one more time. Let's go.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com
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