NBA

After a 55-year wait, Avery’s crew making Brooklyn

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The last spasm of life was as unremarkable as a scorebook allows, the 6,702 people inside Ebbets Field on Sept. 24, 1957, marking “6-3” in pencil in their programs. It was just past 10 o’clock at night, and a pitcher named Danny McDevitt induced a Pittsburgh Pirates first baseman named Dee Fondy to beat the baseball into the ground.

Don Zimmer, the Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop, fielded the ball flawlessly, threw a perfect peg to Gil Hodges at first. Two years earlier, another 6-3 — this time started by Pee Wee Reese — had ended the World Series, had delivered the first and only World Series championship to Brooklyn, and a borough celebrated.

This time it was greeted mostly by yawns, to be followed by 55 years of varying degrees of mourning and loss. Brooklyn as a borough of major league sports ceased to exist the moment first-base umpire Vic Delmore lifted his right arm and made it all official. The Dodgers won 2-0. The organist, Gladys Gooding, played, “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You.”

And then “Auld Lang Syne.”

Fifty-five years later, we finally will take that cup o’ kindness yet, and we all will figure a way back to the Borough of Churches. The Dodgers are gone and have stayed gone, and by now belong just as much to Southern California as they ever did to Brooklyn. And today the longing ends.

Today, Brooklyn is big league again, with a team to match the spirit that outlived the Dodgers, a place long fortified by a ferocious parochial pride. Tonight, the Brooklyn Nets play host to the Raptors in the first-ever game at Barclays Center, and if the Knicks would have made more fitting foils on opening night, the mere fact there is an opening night is meaningful, and ought to be at least a little bit magical.

That enthusiasm will be muted — properly — by the realities surrounding this game, by the pain in Brooklyn and its fellow outer boroughs, by the franchise’s former homes of Long Island and New Jersey. It will take a good long while for things to feel the way they ought to feel, for the Nets and Brooklyn to allow themselves to fall fully head and heels for each other.

It’s OK to wait for that. Brooklyn is used to waiting, after all.

“[The players are] going to go out and play with a sense of pride and hopefully it’ll be a good night for us,” Nets coach Avery Johnson said the other day. “Unfortunately we’re not playing against ourselves. Toronto lost a tough one at Indiana [Wednesday night], and they’re a very capable team.”

Said Joe Johnson: “Definitely, we’re antsy.”

The thing about this team, of course, is that this is the only night when nostalgia need be a star, when celebration is not only right, but welcome. This isn’t a team that ought to be living off its sparkling new arena, or its leather-tough borough and its history.

The thing about this team is that it really should be making inroads against the Knicks this season, and not just because of whatever difficulties the Manhattan team may have, not simply as a backlash against the established older brother. There is Deron Williams, and Johnson, and Brook Lopez. There is a team that, at times, looked awfully good together during the preseason.

There is expectation here, as there should be. This will not be a 41-game novelty act at Barclays Center this season. This should be a playoff team. This is a team that should make some noise in the Atlantic Division, that should scare the hell out of a lot of teams, not only the Knicks.

“I like what I’ve seem,” Johnson said not log ago, and that’s exactly right, because there’s a lot to like about the Nets.

And not just the address. It is good we can now build a bridge from Sept. 24, 1957 to today, that Dee Fondy’s 6-3 was merely the entrance ramp to that span, and not an exit into forever. We’ve waited a long time for a night like this, and a season like this. Auld acquaintances have not been forgot.