NBA

Lin fairy tale getting ‘real’ interesting for Knicks

We can stop dealing in the abstract, cease the comparisons to Joe Hardy and Roy Hobbs and Jimmy Chitwood. This isn’t fantasy. This isn’t a Hollywood script. We can shelve the superlatives and move on to two emerging truths:

Jeremy Lin is real.

And because of that, the Knicks are for real.

“He has taken to [Mike] D’Antoni’s offense, and he looks a little bit like Steve Nash out there. It is a point guard’s dream.”

Those are the words of Jason Kidd, who is either the best or the second-best point guard of the NBA’s thirtysomething generation, summoning the man who is either just above or just below him on that order of merit.

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Kidd had just seen first-hand how real — and for real — Lin is. Saw him drop 28 on him and the world champion Mavericks, saw him hand out 14 assists.

Saw him bury a dagger 3 at the shot-clock buzzer late in what would become the best of the Knicks’ eight wins in the nine games since Lin became a foundation piece of the rotation, a feel-good 104-97 victory that ought to start changing the way we view both the Knicks and their centerpiece showpiece.

It was easy — and not entirely wrong — to qualify what the Knicks had done in moving from 8-15 to 15-15 as kneecapping the NBA’s dregs, taking full advantage of a soft segment of the schedule. And when the 6-23 Hornets walked into the Garden on Friday night and went wire-to-wire against the Knicks, harassing Lin into nine turnovers, it was easier still.

That’s one of the reasons yesterday was so intriguing. Could Lin and — more importantly — the Knicks pick themselves off the canvas after their first shared jaw punch? Lin still filled the other boxes of the scoresheet fine against New Orleans, but most of the craziness and zaniness attached to his emergence has been tied to the team’s attendant success.

“You want to measure yourself against the best,” Amar’e Stoudemire said. “And the Mavericks are the ones who have the trophy right now.”

Winning the game was wonderful. Rallying as they did from down 12 in the third quarter was splendid. But the best part of the afternoon wasn’t really captured by the numbers or defined by them.

It was the sweet pleasure of watching what this offense is capable of when it has a full complement of weapons. It was watching the ball snap around. It was watching Steve Novak knock down one open 3 after another, his own Garden folk-hero status rising alongside that other emerging icon.

(Question to Novak: “Do you see No. 16 jerseys starting to rival No. 17 jerseys?” Answer from Novak: “Not anytime soon, no.”)

It was J.R. Smith jumping off the plane from China and immediately knocking down three 3s (New Knicks marketing slogan: “Who shot? J.R.”), not knowing one play of the playbook yet still insinuating himself into an attack that, when it operates best, really is best described — even by the man who crafted it — as a high-level pickup offense.

“We were gong to yell ‘Next!’ ” D’Antoni joked later on, referencing the time-honored playground challenge. “We just kept the court and played all day.”

The folks at the Garden, they would have watched all day, a hell of a day to play two, a grand time to be watching this offense finally resemble the one D’Antoni built in the desert a few years ago, the one he promised to import to Gotham, one that finally has the pieces that allow it to hum.

“It was always something to see,” Novak said of seeing D’Antoni’s old Suns teams turn basketball games into pinball tournaments. “And it’s even better to be a part of. And it’s so simple, only really two rules: Keep your spacing and don’t force it. When it’s clicking, it’s a joy to play.”

And even the skeptics have to understand by now that whenever Carmelo Anthony returns, that only makes the Knicks better, more lethal, forces teams to forget about doubling Lin, as the Mavs did all day.

A point guard’s dream, Jason Kidd called it. In the hands of Jeremy Lin, a Bay Area kid who grew up worshipping Kidd, a Bay Area legend?

It is very, very real. And almost too good to be true.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com