Sports

As the strong pick up pieces after Sandy, give thanks for their fortitude — and the proper role sports play

MAKING A POINT: While towns like Breezy Point were devastated by Hurricane Sandy, sports played a role in the region’s healing, whether it was fans turning to the Giants for a little reprieve or Carmelo Anthony and the Knicks thanking the fans who made it out to their opener with a win over the Heat.

MAKING A POINT: While towns like Breezy Point were devastated by Hurricane Sandy, sports played a role in the region’s healing, whether it was fans turning to the Giants for a little reprieve or Carmelo Anthony and the Knicks thanking the fans who made it out to their opener with a win over the Heat. (Anthony J. Causi)

MAKING A POINT: While towns like Breezy Point were devastated by Hurricane Sandy, sports played a role in the region’s healing, whether it was fans turning to the Giants for a little reprieve or Carmelo Anthony and the Knicks thanking the fans who made it out to their opener with a win over the Heat. (Getty Images)

I trust you have a friend like this, too, a friendship anchored by decades of history and shared experience, one you needed to lean on in recent weeks because of recent events.

If the horrors of Sandy didn’t visit you directly — if you were among the fortunate, as I was, losing only power and cable for a few days, not anything irretrievable or irreplaceable — then you surely knew someone who was, someone in Staten Island, or Long Beach, or Moonachie, or Point Pleasant, or any of a hundred different datelines.

Surely you have a friend like my friend Hammer, who’s been a part of the Breezy Point community his whole life, who has been kind enough across the decades to allow me to visit, and come to know, that wonderful haven on the other side of the Gil Hodges Bridge. Who watched so much of that life disappear in a matter of hours a few weeks ago, who suffered some terrible losses, then walked among the segments of his neighborhood where the losses were beyond terrible.

And who said this to me last week:

“I know whenever something like this happens, you always hear people say, ‘We’ll build it stronger, we’ll build it better, we’ll be back.’ But here … they aren’t just words. I know these people, we know each other, and it’s a real spirit, a real feeling, a real belief. We will be back. I’ve never believed in anything more.”

So this is what I’m most thankful for this Thanksgiving, for the resolve and the determination and the stubborn resilience of my friend Hammer, and your friends on Long Island, and your cousins down the Jersey Shore, and your parents in the Rockaways, and your neighbors who, luck of the draw, had the tree fall in their yard and not yours.

I’m thankful that, despite some poking and some prodding, sports assumed its proper place in the days and weeks after the skies opened and the seas grew with fury. I’m thankful for the legions of runners who redirected their energies from a Marathon never run and helped feed and clothe victims still in the darkest hours of helplessness, who have raised money through their own personal 26.2-mile treks, who would have made Fred Lebow proud the way they have stood up for a city that he loved, that all of us love.

I’m thankful the first Nets-Knicks game of the inter-borough era will be Monday now, and not that awful first Thursday, when nobody was ready for games and fanfare, thankful that Barclays Center will play host to two of the sport’s best teams, featuring players who have tried to lend their own healing hands to the suffering, both figuratively — by playing so well — and literally, by rolling up their sleeves and helping, without being asked.

I’m thankful the Giants — who seemed to carry the burden of so many of their neighbors that first Sunday After, when they lost to the Steelers — look and sound the way so many of us look and sound now, like survivors, determined to get back to the business of our lives. Which, for them, means throwing themselves back into the teeth of their season, starting Sunday against the Packers. And I’m thankful the Jets have embraced a more sober, more businesslike approach to their season, too. The clamor around them can be a lot of fun; just not right now.

I’m thankful for the reminders that sports solve nothing but can salve so much; and I understand why many thought that even the respectful few days of darkness was too little time, that we should have waited a week to resume, maybe longer. Maybe they were right. But I was also there on the Friday night when the Knicks hosted the Heat, and it said so much about who we are as a city, as an area: somehow, the place was packed. Somehow, the atmosphere was electric.

Somehow, we all escaped our troubles for a couple of hours, watched the Knicks begin what has become a splendid, improbable journey. Which really is the point.

On those summer days when I’ve visited my friend Hammer, I was always struck by the large sign that greets everyone at the entrance to that seaside utopia:

God Bless America

God Bless New York

God Bless Breezy Point

In spite of Sandy — and in an odd way, perhaps, because of her — that sentiment has never felt stronger, no matter which city fills in the third line of that mantra for you. Happy Thanksgiving.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com