This was almost nine years ago, a few of us walking along the site that will now be a sparkling new basketball playpen but was then just a musty pile of dreams and ambiguous plans. There was a Brooklyn kid among us, and as we walked in front of the place where the new arena would rise — if it ever would rise — his gaze fixed on a nearby landmark.
“When I was little, all I’d have to do is look in the sky and see Big Ben,” Bernard King said that day, “and I knew Big Ben would bring me home.”
“Big Ben” was the big clock tower on top of the old Williamsburgh Savings Bank, a compass for millions of kids across the generations, kids who grew up to tell stories of the old Brooklyn, to keep that old Brooklyn alive in their memories and in their devotions.
The old bank is a luxury apartment complex now, and it isn’t even the tallest building in the borough anymore, replaced by the Brooklyner on Lawrence Street a few years ago. But so much about Brooklyn is about memory, and about loss, and about rebirth. Maybe the kids of the ’40s and ’50s always put too much stock in what the Dodgers meant to them, but you could never deny the hole in their hearts — and in Brooklyn — that the 1957 defection caused.
Basketball did help fill the athletic void across the decades, children like King and his kid brother, Albert, and Billy Cunningham and Chris Mullin, and Connie Hawkins and Pearl Washington and so many others, a list that could fill a Hall of Fame and a half, the pedigree to which the Nets, the new kids on the block, will inherit, automatically.
“You go anywhere in the country, you ask anyone: ‘What’s the capital of basketball?’ and they’ll say: ‘Brooklyn,’ ” King said that day in January 2004. “It makes perfect sense to me. It should make perfect sense to anyone who knows what basketball has always meant to this borough. I mean, look around here. Look at this. How great would this be here?”
At the time, King was looking at a railway yard at the triangular meeting point of Atlantic, Flatbush and Fifth Avenues. It was the same spot that Walter O’Malley had once coveted, back when he wanted to build a futuristic dome to house his Dodgers after they’d outgrown Ebbets Field, before Robert Moses and the other bureaucrats had insisted the team would have to live in Queens.
Before O’Malley figured: if the Brooklyn Dodgers played in Queens, they were no longer the Brooklyn Dodgers, so what was the difference if they played in Los Angeles?
That was 55 years ago. This fall, major league sports returns to the Borough of Churches, a long overdue reconnection. You don’t have to like Bruce Ratner, the man who used to own the Nets and only did so because that was how he would grow to occupy this splendid corner of the world. You sure don’t have to like his methods, the way he chased longtime residents from their homes.
You absolutely don’t have to be a Nets fan; one of the intriguing questions about the Nets’ new address is how they will convince Brooklyn — a Knicks stronghold from Day 1 of the Basketball Association of America in 1946 — and its citizens to suddenly switch allegiances.
Those are all valid issues.
But so is this one:
After 55 years, Brooklyn is a major league town again. After 5 1⁄2 decades of so many stories trapped in yesterday, there is a sporting today and a sporting tomorrow worth talking about, and a sparkling new palace in which all of that future history will be played out. Five and a half decades after O’Malley broke Brooklyn’s heart, that heart beats ever louder and stronger.
“Some things are just worth believing in,” Bernard King, child of Brooklyn, said in January 2004, his memories colliding with the imagination of what could be — and what now is, this new showroom called Barclay’s Center. “Like basketball. And Brooklyn.”
mvaccaro@nypost.com