Metro

No courage to play in toughest city

Across from the Garden, at a place called Local at 33rd and Eighth, here came LeBron James on the small-screen televisions from the Boys & Girls Club of Greenwich, Conn., and it grew as quiet as Knicks game night has been for far too long.

“The Decision,” at last.

“I’m taking my talents to South Beach,” LeBron James told Jim Gray on ESPN.

And at that very moment, the symbol of the Knicks’ two-year full-court press on King James became a deflated basketball. They took their best shot when they landed Amar’e Stoudemire. That set up the money shot.

Airball.

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So feel free to go ahead and call him LeChicken, or The Chicken King, for passing on the opportunity to chase his first championship on the biggest stage. Which is what Knicks owner James Dolan all but did at the noon Garden press conference for Stoudemire, when he said loud enough for LeBron to hear:

“It takes courage to play where the lights shine the brightest.”

A young man from The Bronx named Thomas Ortiz, wearing a Latrell Sprewell jersey, said, “Look, he’s from Akron, Ohio, he’s a small-town kid — he wants to be a big fish in a small pond. His life is a fishbowl already. Him coming to New York, that’s gonna be enhanced tenfold. He might not be able to deal with that kind of pressure.”

So New York scared him? “I think it did,” Ortiz said.

Forget for a moment the infuriated, devastated people of Cleveland, who were facing Eric Mangini’s Browns as a fallback option to get them through the brutal winter. They didn’t want to hear that they had seven years with their Chosen One, who earned the right to be free. But not the right to kick them in the teeth with the whole world watching.

But The Chosen One choosing the Miami Heat would tell us in lights as bright as Broadway’s that if the heat’s too hot, get out of the New York kitchen. Better yet, don’t even enter the kitchen.

“This changes his whole legacy,” Brooklyn’s Jason Vollodas said. “I’m not sure if he can be mentioned in the same sentence as Kobe and Jordan now.”

Did New York scare him?

“Oh sure,” Vollodas said. “New York is a very intimidating place and if you lose, you go from being a king to being a peasant . . . I think he’s a sucker. I think he fell for the Pat Riley trap. Pat Riley seduced him, in some weird way like he seduces everybody else.”

That light at the end of that long, dark tunnel, Knicks fans?

LeGone.

steve.serby@nypost.com