NBA

Knicks win fixed nothing but it felt so good

This didn’t bring back any of the ruined boardwalks, didn’t rid the streets of Long Beach or Seaside Heights of the sand, the debris, the ubiquitous ring of melancholy. It didn’t turn on one light, bring even one electrical outlet crackling back to life.

Didn’t lighten the load of even one resident of New York, New Jersey or Connecticut who started the week ensconced in their dream homes and end it squeezing tight to loved ones in a hotel room, a relative’s house, a shelter.

It was just a basketball game, after all.

And, Lord knows, if we learned one thing yesterday, of all days, it’s that for all our fervent, ferocious sporting passions we are mostly a city of reason, perspective, balance. Mayor Bloomberg certainly found that out thanks to the citizens taking to social media and talk radio and the telephone, an angry assault that finally put an end to the folly of the Marathon.

So, no: this was no panacea, no matter how enjoyable it may have been, no matter that it was a 104-84 clobbering of the defending-champion Heat, no matter that from start to finish it was an intoxicating taste of what the Knicks can be. There was a full house, yes, but the 19,033 people inside were full of conflict, and the Knicks knew it.

“We looked at it as an opportunity,” Tyson Chandler said, “to shed some light, put some smiles on their faces, for a couple of hours anyway.”

So they rattled the renovated walls whenever Carmelo Anthony caught fire, whenever Raymond Felton reminded why everyone loved him the first time around, whenever Steve Novak launched a 3, whenever Jason Kidd turned the clock back just long enough.

“I still have a few tricks,” Kidd said with a wink.

But that was the point also: even with Kidd playing like it was 1999, there was no magic rewind button, even if everyone would have liked that very much, launched all the way back to last Sunday, when we still hoped Sandy, that scoundrel, would take a hard right-hand turn and have at the Atlantic Ocean, not Atlantic City.

Even with the Knicks playing defense like it was 1992 or 1995 or 1998, contesting every possession, guarding the Heat frenetically — even with Eastern Standard Time at the scorer’s table — you couldn’t nudge the clock back enough to spare State Island, or the Rockaways, or Breezy Point.

Still, the games were going to come back at some point, and the folks inside the Garden did deliver something of an endorsement that last night should be the time, and the place. It would have surprised no one if only 12 or 14,000 people had come, partly out of pressing priorities and partly because it had to have been a hell of hassle for many of them to get here.

And yet they came, they eyeballed the Garden’s new layout, they booed LeBron James. They thrilled as the Knicks lead swelled to 18 in the first half and 23 in the third quarter. They chanted “M! V! P!” for Melo, even began a chant for Rasheed Wallace, Earth’s most unlikely walk-on.

“The atmosphere was great,” said Dwyane Wade, the Heat star who pledged his game check to the Sandy recovery. “It was great and the Knicks fed off that and it was an emotional kind of game for the city. It was a great time to let the community forget about things for a few hours. We were grateful to be a part of it.”

Maybe some came purely out of a need for distraction, but it sounded like they were there out of a sense of basketball, too, and fun, and they went batty when Wallace knocked down a 3 in the final minute and louder as the final seconds melted away and the buzzer groaned and the Knicks moved to 1-0.

You know when we’ll know everyone is truly back, when everyone is flush with normalcy? In the days and nights in the coming weeks and months when the Knicks don’t play anywhere near the level they played at last night, when it will seem proper to gripe about them again.

Last night, there was simply nothing to grumble about.

And that seemed awfully proper, too.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com