Twenty-two seconds deep, he figured, was plenty long enough to wait. Might as well see how the knee was feeling. Might as well see if there would be any rust, any corrosion, to work through.
Twenty-two seconds deep, Pablo Prigioni found Carmelo Anthony open, a step and a half behind the 3-point line. No need to wait more than that.
Splash.
For the first time — and the last time, truth be told — the Garden cleared its throat and roared. It is in these moments when there is no ambiguity about how Knicks fans feel about Melo, just unanimity. The stroke was pure. The knee looked fine. Later, he would say it felt fine.
“It was good,” Raymond Felton would say later, “to have our horse back.”
It was also the Magic, one of the truly woeful teams in pro basketball, and so everything the Knicks did last night was going to be measured and cautious, right to the final score, a 106-94 breeze over the 18-51 Magic. There would be no brass bands and no brash words following this, which is as it should’ve been.
There was relief and a sense of at least partial restoration. And that’s as it should’ve been, also.
“I was pain free,” Anthony said.
He was 7-for-14 from the field, he grabbed eight rebounds, he was 3-of-5 from 3-point range, he flushed an alley-oop dunk. And because the Knicks took care of business with a 32-19 third quarter, there was no need to extend him, either. Coach Mike Woodson limited him to 32 1/2 minutes, meaning he should be plenty fresh for the back-to-back with Toronto facing the Knicks starting tomorrow.
“It was a big time relief,” Woodson said. “It lets me know that Melo is back to being Melo.”
Maybe not quite, maybe not all the way. But enough. The Knicks have 16 games left in the regular season, and even though the Nets collected an impossible win in Dallas, the Knicks retained a two-game cushion in the loss column for the Atlantic Division lead, they lowered their magic number for clinching the division to 15 — and with the Celtics losing at New Orleans, it further solidified the notion the division really will be a two-team race.
“I’m not looking over our shoulder,” Woodson said. “I won’t beg for help. We have to handle our own business.”
For the Knicks, for now, that means relearning what it means to have Anthony and his 28-points-per-game back in the lineup. It means reacclimating themselves to having a critical weapon at their disposal. They aren’t near whole, of course, and nearly lost another component when Iman Shumpert dinged up his knee, and there always will be eyes locked on the gaping hole in the Knicks’ defense where Tyson Chandler is supposed to be.
“We just have to maintain, and keep trusting each other, and keep figuring out how to keep winning games,” said Jason Kidd, playing his next-to-last game as a thirtysomething and registering a Kidd-like line: five points, five assists, three steals. “We’re not the first team to go out west and lose a couple of games. We have to leave all of that behind us.”
It’s a task made easier when they move forward with Anthony in the fold. It is easy — and quite natural — to be skeptical of the optimistic mood the player and the team took following his lost trip west, his awful night in Oakland, his painful night in Denver, the two cross-country flights he took in order to get his knee drained and rejoin the team in Los Angeles.
After all, the Knicks are a team that hasn’t just been bitten by the injury bug, they’ve fallen headfirst into a hive. Every day brings a new bump, a new bruise, another new boot for someone’s foot, another fresh round of CT scans and MRIs. They would be wise to travel in a protective bubble.
Which is why it was just as well that, 22 seconds in, Carmelo Anthony cocked, fired, and launched a 3. No need to prolong the business of getting on with the rest of the season. On it is.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com