NBA

With long summer ahead, Knicks realize they blew golden opportunity

It doesn’t settle easily, not for you, not for them. On a day when the Knicks wanted to be shooting around at their training headquarters in Westchester County, preparing for Game 7 against the Pacers — and beyond — they were having exit interviews instead, saying goodbye, shutting the door on a season, in May, they knew was supposed to last until June.

“It’s very disappointing,” Tyson Chandler said. “I haven’t slept in two days thinking about what could’ve been.”

Iman Shumpert was even more blunt about it.

“We know we needed to go farther,” he said, “and we didn’t.”

This was a day for regret, in what will soon become a week overrun with it. What will make the Knicks feel better, the Heat sweeping the Pacers? The Pacers shocking the Heat and the world? Anything?

And will they even notice?

“I won’t watch for a while,” Raymond Felton said. “Eventually I will, the way most basketball fans will. But not yet. It’s too soon.”

There was a definitive sense among the Knicks who talked yesterday that they know very well what was lost along with a basketball game Saturday night, along with an Eastern Conference semifinal series. Maybe they aren’t as specific about it as you have been the past 60 hours or so. But they know.

“We gave our all and came up short,” Chandler said. “Sometimes, that happens.”

Said Carmelo Anthony: “We kind of teased the city of New York by playing at this level. We want to come back and play at this level and even beyond.”

That captured it best, in many ways. For so much of a regular season that yielded 54 wins and a vast array of positives, you could sense just how difficult it was for the city to fall back in love, unconditionally, with its basketball team. Those old enough to remember the near-miss glory boys of the 1990s remember how the annual pursuit of the title — which, inevitably, never quite made it to the mountain peak — would destroy them year after year.

As much as any game in this town, good Knicks teams demand an emotional investment. There are many who still wear deep, ruinous scars inflicted by a rogues’ gallery of offenders named Jordan and Miller, Olajuwon and Duncan. Hell, even Knicks fans old enough to actually remember the championship teams can turn haunted when they speak of the titles left on the table by those teams.

Those memories, those agonies, they taunt and shadow Knicks fans, and yet, as harrowing as they may be, at the end, it doesn’t compare with the irrelevance that swallowed the Garden in the ’00s, and even the deep, abiding flaws that kept you from completely taking these last two teams seriously.

Eventually, you came around. Eventually, as the Knicks piled up those 54 wins, as they looked as good as anyone not based in South Beach in the regular season, they reeled you back in again. They overshadowed baseball season (a good things in Queens, not so much in The Bronx), just like the old days.

And even their failures seemed to deepen the sense of commitment: They stumbled against the Celtics and survived. They blew Game 1 against the Pacers, looked as if they were going to get run out of the building in Game 6, came back, took a lead, offered a genuine belief they would need to unlock the doors at the Garden last night …

“We thought we’d be bringing it back to New York,” Anthony said.

He shrugged.

“And couldn’t.”

So some of them have gone sleepless the past few nights, same as you. Some of them are clearly thinking of what the team is going to look like next season. If the Knicks are going to remain competitive in the East, there will definitely have to be certain alterations made within the confines of their cap-strangled payroll.

Plenty of time to agonize over what will be.

Even on a day when the true regret was over something that wouldn’t be: a Game 7 at the Garden, a night that should have turned the Midtown gymnasium into something utterly electric instead of serving as an empty skating rink awaiting the Rangers. Just when you thought you were out, they pulled you back in.

What a tease.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com