NBA

It’s the most wonderful time of hoops year

This time, there is no honeymoon period. There is no grading on a curve. There is no celebrating baby steps as if they were giant leaps.

This time, for the first time in a long time, the Knicks enter a season spackled with expectation, with promise and hope and all the wonderfully limitless options that offers …

And all the latent disappointment lurking around every corner.

Good. Bring it on. Let this season start, at last, this noontime encounter with the Celtics kicking off a 66-game sprint toward the spring. Let the Garden roar again, and not with the grateful yelps we heard last year, when the fervent and the faithful were relieved simply to be relevant again, but with a voice from deeper in the diaphragm, one that has yearned so long for a team to match the city’s basketball passion.

“You spend time elsewhere in this league, and you hear guys talk about what it’s like in New York, and you don’t really appreciate it until you come here and you feel what it’s like,” Tyson Chandler said the other night. “And that’s when you’re coming in with a better team and you know you should beat the Knicks, and the fans know it, too.”

He smiled.

“But when you come here and you’re playing for the Knicks, and you know you have a fighting chance?”

Chandler’s been here 15 minutes and already gets the ethos of the city and the people who have waited so long for a season such as this one. All of that is well. All of that is good.

And now, we get to see if this edition of the Knicks warrants the kind of excitement, the kind of anticipation attached to them. That’s the trick, of course. That’s the key. The Knicks finally have assembled a team that makes the city and him and makes opponents think twice. They have Chandler and Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony as their three-tiered anchor, and they have some intriguing parts in development and in waiting.

Now it’s time to see if that can translate to victory.

“People have expectations for this team,” Mike D’Antoni said. “And it’s right that they do. They should.”

It’s asking a lot for a team to emerge ready to survive the gauntlet of an NBA season — even a truncated one — after only a few weeks and two practice games together. But that’s what the Knicks have to do.

A team like this, a town like this, a season like this, they need a fast start. They need to take advantage of a diminished Paul Pierce today, send a message not only to Boston, but to themselves.

They need to be competitive on the West Coast swing this week, in Oakland and L.A. and Sacramento. They need to seize what looks to be a soft underbelly of a January schedule, and survive their only back-to-back-to-back — which opens February (home to Chicago, at Boston, home to the Nets).

Is this too much to expect? We’ll see. If the Knicks are as good as they want us to believe they are — and it was D’Antoni himself, not a pie-eyed fan, who threw out the notion they’re contenders this year — then it absolutely isn’t. It is possible that Stoudemire and Anthony can learn to play with each other with more comfort and execution than what we saw from last year’s rushed-together debut?

They better. Even if there hasn’t exactly been a long training camp to help force that cohesion this time around, either.

These are the things that stand before the Knicks now, on an opening day that feels the way all those faraway openers from the ’90s felt — a mix of tension and fear and excitement and possibility. It’s been so long since we expected anything out of the Knicks. This is a positive step forward. This is a splendid change of pace.

Open the Garden gates. Let the games begin. It feels like a basketball season again, and if you’re a basketball fan, that’s the best present you’ve opened all year.