This has to be about the Nets now, from today going forward, from today until forever. This isn’t about the Dodgers any longer, about the way they once filled Brooklyn with fever and fervor, a mutual affair that will linger as long as there are people who remember Ebbets Field and the Boys of Summer.
“I can close my eyes,” an old Dodgers catcher named Joe Pignatano said last night, “and I can still hear those cheers.”
This isn’t about the Knicks, either, even if Manhattan’s team is bound to serve as a guidepost throughout this season, throughout the opening salvos of the Nets’ planting roots at Barclays Center. It was amusing when the owner put a billboard up within view of the Garden’s corporate office. It’s been interesting listening to longtime Knicks fans with Brooklyn ties pondering their rooting affiliations going forward.
And it’s been fun listening to Mikhail Prokhorov’s digs and jabs. Although it’s far more useful for the Nets’ owner — and for Nets fans — to embrace the thinking that Prokhorov embodied last night, a few minutes before tip-off, something that was probably intended to be a slap at the Knicks but really should be something else.
“Yesterday, I went to bed at 8 o’clock to be up at 4 in the morning for a great workout,” Prokhorov quipped when asked if he had paid attention to the Knicks’ 104-84 throttling of the Heat on the other side of the East River a night earlier.
It’s hard to believe he wasn’t paying attention.
But it’s good to believe he wasn’t paying attention. It’s good to think about a time when the Nets are allowed — and allow themselves — to worry strictly about the Nets, to leave the Knicks’ problems to the Knicks, to cede the Dodgers’ history to the dreamers and the archivists and the historians.
The Nets went about the business of building something permanent last night. For a while, it seemed they were taking the notion of being neighborly to an extreme, refusing to guard any Toronto Raptors for the game’s first 12 minutes. But the Raptors are the Raptors for a reason, and if they weren’t the first choice to serve as honorary lid-lifter, they were a splendid choice as a foe for Homecoming Night.
So the Nets moved to 1-0 with this 107-100 win, they got 27 points from Brook Lopez, got 19 points and nine assists from Deron Williams, got 14 points from Joe Johnson, their Big Three reporting for duty on time, energizing the crowd, providing the Nets with what may honestly be their best home-court advantage since they tried cramming 4,000 people into the 3,500-seat Island Garden back in the day.
It is a beautiful arena, Barclays Center, with 17,732 seats and acoustics that can get it awfully loud even when only about 15,732 of them are filled. The empties surely were a result of a climactic storm and an anti-climactic opening opponent, but this isn’t the time to judge anybody by their no-shows, not when other priorities abound.
Honestly? There wasn’t a lot to argue with last night. Prokhorov was Prokhorov beforehand, reminding everyone that he’s now three years away from having to fulfill his marriage vow if the Nets don’t win a title. David Stern was in the house, honoring “the resilience of the community” and welcoming “Brooklyn, USA to the NBA” and, thankfully, not summoning Katrina when he meant Sandy, as he did in Miami the other night.
Pignatano was there, and the great Ralph Branca, and somehow it didn’t look as silly as it should have when they wore tank tops with “BROOKLYN” over their dress shirts.
“Brooklyn,” Branca said, “is the best.”
It always was, of course, which is why after 55 years there still is so much affection attached to those memories, those times, those athletes. And judging by the energy in the building last night, it still can be. On its own. Walking its own path. Creating its own legacy. Building its own history.
Remember the tree that grew in Brooklyn? Remember the tomatoes that Pignatano used to plant in the Mets’ bullpen at Shea Stadium? Those should be the images we think about with the Nets now. The Dodgers are long gone. The Knicks belong to another borough. The Nets are Brooklyn’s now. It ought to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com