On April 29, 2001, Roger Clemens allowed four hits over 7 1⁄3 innings at Yankee Stadium, earning his 263rd career victory as the Yankees beat the A’s, 3-1. On April 29, 2001, the football Giants threw five years and $20 million at defensive end Kenny Holmes, luring him from the Titans. Benny Agbayani made a couple of errors in the outfield for the Mets in St. Louis.
On April 29, 2001, Alec Baldwin found himself in hot water for having confronted a heckler … and First Daughter Jenna Bush was dealing with an underage drinking charge at the University of Texas … and Sen. Hillary Clinton weighed in on the Amadou Diallo shooting, saying, “I am very disappointed in the NYPD” …
Janet Jackson topped the pop charts with “All For You.” On TV, the finale of “Survivor: Australian Outback” eked out a win over “ER” for the top-rated show of the week. “Driven” outdueled “Bridget Jones’ Diary” at the movie box office. And on Broadway, 10 days after its premiere, “The Producers” was starting to look like it might be a keeper.
Oh, yes — the Knicks won a basketball game that night, too.
They beat the Raptors at AirCanada Centre, 97-89, to take a 2-1 lead in their best-of-five Eastern Conference quarterfinal series. They did it without two starters — Marcus Camby was back in New York dealing with a family issue; Larry Johnson never left the bench. And they won anyway. It may be hard to believe, but it was a quintessential Knicks playoff win in those days: against the odds, against the grain.
“You always hear that that is the trademark of this team,” said Othella Harrington, whom the Knicks acquired from the Grizzlies midway through that season. “This team is known for when things go bad they rally together. This is a prime example.”
Well, it was then. But to be fair: That was 4,022 days ago. A lot of stuff can happen in 96,528 hours.
“Sure, it’s an incentive, but God, again, and I’m not one for excuses — this team hasn’t been together that long,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said yesterday, on the eve of the Knicks’ playoff debut at the Garden, the team already staring at a 2-0 hole and upping the degree of difficulty of their 2001 forebears, missing three starters.
“There are a lot things that are at stake here. Yeah, expectations are high. It’s been that way all year. And it’s gonna always be that way if I’m the coach. … We still control our own destiny here. I’m thinking about Game 3, trying to get a game under our belts and see if we can force the action.”
It’s swell that Woodson doesn’t want to hang the darkness of a desperate decade and change on his team, but that’s the way these things work. There wasn’t one man on the Red Sox these past few years who was even alive in 1946, many weren’t in 1967, few could remember 1975 or 1986. But history is an inheritance in sports. Ask the Jets: Joe Namath isn’t just a voice on the radio every week during the regular season. He occupies a roster spot: chief ghost.
So it is with these Knicks. It is amusing checking out the stories of those Knicks of 2001, the first season post-Patrick, the players he left behind still lauded, nightly, as gallant warriors. They would lose Games 3 and 4 to those Raptors, then tumble into a choking sinkhole, emerging only for four playoff losses to the Nets in 2004, four more to the Celtics last year, and the first two of this quarterfinal series with the Heat.
“Nobody ever said it was going to be easy,” Carmelo Anthony said.
No, probably not. But nobody ever said it was going to be impossible, either. Nobody would ever have believed you that Sunday afternoon 4,022 days ago if you had told them that, by week’s end, the Knicks would begin a streak of 12 straight playoff losses that, if it reaches 13 tonight, will set an NBA record for postseason futility.
Forget why the Knicks play tonight: out of pride, out of defiance, out of fear. This is a record nobody wants a part of. Doesn’t matter how long any of them have been here. If it happens it’s theirs to share. Forever.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com