The Garden has seen enough calamity, enough slapstick basketball across the last 13 seasons to last a lifetime. And then finally, a team that looked to all New York as an oasis in the desert of despair, with Carmelo Anthony starring as The Straw That Stirred The Drink.
Finally, a coach who talked passionately about a long-lost championship journey. Finally, a playoff series victory.
And now?
Now the Knicks come home to a Garden bracing for the unthinkable, the unacceptable, the Indiana Pacers dancing on a blue-and-orange graveyard tonight.
Game 5 is no time and no place for the Knicks to die.
Shame on them if they do.
Shame on them if they go out like chumps.
The least they can do is make a last stand, so they can at least live for another day, so they can give New York hope, however fleeting, that they can somehow be the ninth team in NBA history to overcome a 3-1 deficit.
If this ends tonight, if it ends Saturday night, if it ends with no showdown with the Heat, there will be blood on Melo’s hands, more than anyone’s, in part because he is not LeBron James, in part because he could not find a way to make everyone around him better and shake the ballhog monkey off his back, but mostly because he did not get a championship-starved fan base close enough to a championship.
Of course, it isn’t his fault Amar’e Stoudemire began breaking down, even if the idea they could play together was wishful thinking. It isn’t his fault sidekick J.R. Smith has abandoned him. It isn’t his fault Tyson Chandler can’t deal with Roy Hibbert.
Of course the Knicks are much better off with Melo, that isn’t up for debate. But this will go on his playoff resume, be a forever part of his legacy, if it ends unsatisfactorily.
Mike Woodson is a good coach, but he hardly looked like an elite coach deciding to go big (Kenyon Martin instead of Pablo Prigioni) and coming up small, a move that reeked of panic. Woodson now appears to have come to the conclusion that it is wiser to dance with who brung you, and is ready to go back to the future and go small again and hope to come up big.
Woodson has returned a culture of Dee-Fense to the Knicks, but the Pacers, with their length and athleticism and lurking presence of Hibbert, play it the way it is meant to be played. And because Paul George can shadow Melo solo, because nuking the Knicks’ 3-point threat is right in the Pacers’ wheelhouse, this has proven to be a bad matchup for the basketball band that should be renamed J.D. & The Not-So Straight Shots.
The Knicks should understand that if they cannot summon the pride and heart and fight to defend their Garden, defend their city, over these next 48 minutes, after a season in which they raised expectations to the rafters, then they will be remembered as fraud pretenders at best, failures at worst.
It is one thing to miss shots, quite another to leave as the lasting image a team that didn’t want it as much as the Pacers did. A team that wasn’t as hungry, or as tough, or as together, or as committed, or as smart.
“Listen,” Woodson said yesterday, his back against a wall at the Knicks’ practice facility, “this is the first time our backs have really been against the wall, and it’s gonna be interesting for me as a coach to see how we come out and accept that and see if we can fight our way out of it.”
The cruel basketball gods who compelled Stoudemire to smack that fire extinguisher a year ago at AmericanAirlines Arena have been at it again. Melo (left shoulder) hasn’t complained, nor should he. Smith and Martin took sick. Stoudemire (surgical knee) is rusty. Iman Shumpert (knee) didn’t look himself Tuesday night. Steve Novak is Claude Rains.
And nobody cares. Because there are no excuses.
When the Knicks seized a 3-0 series lead against the Celtics, Woodson and the Knicks kept telling us it is difficult to close out an opponent. Now let them show the Pacers how difficult it is.
Smith was engulfed by media yesterday when assistant coach Darrell Walker walked by and said to him: “Got your back to the corner, huh, young fella? You know what happens when they back a dog in the corner?”
Smith said: “I know. We’re gonna find out.”
Time for their bite to be worse than their bark.
steve.serby@nypost.com