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INDIANAPOLIS — It’s hard to believe they can make an exact duplicate of what they got Thursday night. Thirty-four seconds into Game 5, Pablo Prigioni found Carmelo Anthony ducking into the lane, Anthony swished a 12-footer, the Knicks jumped to a 2-0 lead.
And that was that. That was it. The Pacers never took the lead. They never tied. They only had a couple of opportunities to tie. The NBA is a league of runs, a league of streaks, a league of slumps, so it’s exceedingly rare to see a team win wire-to-wire.
“That’s the way you like to get it done,” Tyson Chandler said.
“A quick start helps,” J.R. Smith said. “You can build on that.”
It’s like the imperious Yankees owner, Jacob Ruppert, once said all the way back in the day: the ideal ballgame for him, the brewmeister said, “is when the Yankees score eight runs in the first inning and slowly pull away.”
So, no: the odds of another wire-to-wire run are slim, especially tonight, especially on the Pacers’ home floor, especially with 18,000 inhospitable Hoosiers hoping to howl the Knicks all the way back home.
But the message is the same, and the hope has to be self-evident: if the Knicks hope to clear the middle hurdle of this thee-part challenge — and, in truth, if they survive to Monday night back home, in a Game 7 — they need to be playing with a lead as early and as often as they can.
They need something like what they got at the end of the first quarter on Thursday — up 19-15, a modest goal — and they need to go on from there. Some teams can overcome, some play well — better, even — from behind. Hell, the Knicks themselves have had plenty of games this year where the wake-up call of a steep deficit served as an engine.
But this isn’t Sacramento in December or Cleveland in February. And these aren’t the Knicks who at various points of the year have been able to score in bunches. This is Indianapolis in May, a Knicks team that has been prone to long swaths of offensive ineptitude, especially at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.
Maybe in theory they could come back from a 12-point third-quarter deficit.
But it isn’t likely.
Smith actually gave perfect-pitch voice to what has to be a Knicks priority tonight when he said, after that 85-75 win at the Garden the other night: “We have to grind one quarter at a time. As long as we win every quarter, we’ll win the game.”
Yesterday, Mike Woodson agreed.
“It would be nice,” the Knicks coach said of playing from ahead. “We haven’t had that burst that we need on their floor. It would be nice to get off to a great start tomorrow night. That’s what I’m going to be pushing for, see if they can play catch-up basketball instead of us having to do it. That’s going to be very important that we get off to a good start, then just maintain it throughout the course of the game.”
There have been a lot of things breaking right for the Knicks the past few days, none more critical or fundamental than George Hill’s concussion. The Pacers looked rudderless without him in Game 5, and even if he’s allowed to play in Game 6, there’s no telling how well he will manage the after-effects. Lance Stephenson was banged good at the Garden. And Roy Hibbert has looked less and less like George Mikan the longer the series has progressed.
Still, Paul George has been terrific and hasn’t yet had a great shooting night. David West seemed to take the Game 5 loss personally and has given the Knicks’ frontcourt nightmares. And if the Pacers — who really are a well-coached team — ever cut in half the number of mindless, unforced turnovers, they really will present problems for the Knicks.
Even with all of that, in Games 3 and 4 they surged early, surged out of halftime, gave themselves just enough cushion that the Knicks had no chance of coming back at them. That’s a dangerous path, an impossible blueprint, especially in an elimination game. Follow the leader is a dangerous game. Unless you’re the leader.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com