LOUIS TAYLOR, JABARI
Taylor and his 17-year-old nephew of Far Rockaway came to the Garden in hopes of getting tickets to the game. (Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post)
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They couldn’t take it any longer!
Basketball-starved fans made the trek to Madison Square Garden to watch the Knicks open their season last night with a 104-84 victory over Miami despite severely altered transportation service, the threat of cancellation and the massive cleanup left behind by Hurricane Sandy.
Knicks fan Louis Taylor couldn’t take the cold and darkness of Far Rockaway any more. So, with the help of his sister, he landed a Midtown hotel room and then got in line to wait for cancellations to the game.
“My family had to leave, things are crazy,” said Taylor, who came to Midtown with his mother, sister and 17-year-old nephew, Jabari.
“We were two, three days without power. Our home is okay, whatever is being said [about damage] we didn’t see it.”
Taylor said at nightfall, he really couldn’t see anything it was so dark. So finally yesterday, a hotel room became available and he pounced.
Brian Haz, 25, of Flatbush, couldn’t take any more waiting. So he waved off the lines for the bus and walked to the Garden from Brooklyn’s Barclays Center neighborhood.
Haz, wearing a Knicks jersey and hat, trudged for nearly two hours — “about an hour-50,” he said. He had already experienced disappointment with his beloved Knicks once — he had tickets to Thursday’s canceled opener in Brooklyn against the Nets. So yesterday, he traveled by subway to downtown Brooklyn but when he saw the lines there to board buses, he figured walking was the best way to make it to the game.
Haz even made it to the Garden before a buddy he was meeting. His friend took mass transportation.
“I really was not waiting anymore,” said Haz, who bought his ticket “when they first went on sale.”
Haz supported the decision to play the game, especially following Thursday’s postponement against the Nets and waiting months for the Knicks opener.
“They canceled yesterday’s game, they might as well play today,” Haz said. “Especially as fans we’ve been waiting for months for these games, might as well play at least one.”
Two other Brooklynites, Kaydin and Jaydin Sanchez, a father and son from Sheepshead Bay, waited an hour to get over the Brooklyn Bridge before catching a ride with a stranger who needed two more passengers to satisfy the new three-person carpool rules put in place at Manhattan crossings.
“Thankfully there was a guy who needed two passengers to get over the bridge and he got us over here,” Kaydin Sanchez, 30, said. “It was a pain in the butt to get over to that side of Brooklyn. We were waiting there for an hour, we got lucky. If I needed to walk, I was going to get here and watch this game.”
Other fans, like the Dorman family, used the game as a way to escape from their blacked-out homes.
The family of five, including father Howard, mother Lori and their three sons — Ben, 22, and 17-year-old twins Evan and Louis — fled Long Island and their power-less home Wednesday and found “maybe the last two hotel rooms in the city” and five tickets to the season opener.
“Not making a pun, but a light bulb went off,” Howard Dorman said. “Our power was out, we’re huge Knicks fans and it made sense.”
So they made the trip. “Thank God the trains were running,” Lori Dorman said.
Sandy’s havoc almost cost two Knicks fans that traveled all the way from Melbourne, Australia, the chance to see their team play LeBron James and the Heat.
“We were a little bit concerned earlier in the week,” Shannon Ryan, 34, said alongside his wife Ilona.
“We bought [these tickets] online months ago. We would have been very disappointed and probably lost a lot of money too.”
fred.kerber@nypost.com