SAN FRANCISCO — This is a lesson everyone learns when they sign on for New York City: Even when you’re supposed to be an underdog, you’re an overdog. Even when nobody identifies you as a dominant team, everybody revels in your misery.
Los Angeles gets that a little. Chicago. Lately, Boston has attracted its share of this. Call it the Revenge of the Flyover States.
“Nobody ever feels sorry for Goliath,” Joe Torre once said, when the Yankees’ disabled list was especially crowded, and it’s certainly a credo that his successor, Joe Girardi, can live by in a spring when every day seems to invite bumps, bruises and bloodshed into the Yankees clubhouse.
Then we have the Knicks, who this evening will kick off the seminal stretch of their season, five games in eight nights, all of them on or near the left coast, most of which will finish after you’ve gone to bed on worknights, a peripatetic journey through Oakland, Denver, Portland, Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.
By this time next Tuesday, we will all have a better sense of where the Knicks are in the Eastern Conference, whether their mission of finishing with the No. 2 seed is sustainable, if they can maintain their Atlantic Division cushions on the Nets and Celtics. They will do all of this without the services of Amar’e Stoudemire, we already know that. It’s anybody’s guess when — or if — Carmelo Anthony will rejoin the fun.
It is a hell of a time to be short-handed. Nobody ever feels sorry for Goliath, even when Goliath has gone 40 years without a championship, as long as there’s a “NEW YORK” stitched across the uniform jersey.
“We can’t sit and sulk,” Mike Woodson said the other night.
The trip won’t let them. The task won’t let them. The Knicks started the season 6-0 and 18-6 and 21-9 under the exact same circumstances, with Stoudemire out with a busted-up knee, with an aging roster, when every night and every win seemed as if it was coming with the aid of mirrors and magic.
Actually, it was something else, something better: Too often, as the Knicks struggled in the early hours of Stoudemire’s return, it became fashionable to blame Stoudemire’s presence for the struggles, rather than credit what the Knicks had done in his absence. Arguing the Knicks are potentially better without Stoudemire is as foolish as making the same case for the Knicks’ Melo-free fortunes.
But that doesn’t mean the Knicks can’t survive. They have survived. They beat the Spurs without Stoudemire. They beat the Heat without Stoudemire and Anthony. If anything, it seems that Woodson relishes the challenge of coaching short-handed (even if he’s smart enough to never cop to that) and, well, he has that opportunity now.
Knicks fans of a certain vintage surely remember that even in prosperous times, the team has often been subjected to mirroring trying times. They won the 1999 Eastern Conference finals despite playing the final four games of that series without Patrick Ewing, who hurt his Achilles. There was, of course, Game 5 of the ’70 Finals, won without Willis Reed and his ruined thigh.
The parallel that might make the most sense — and provide the most hope — was in 1972, though. Reed played only 11 games the whole year because of an injured left knee. Jerry Lucas, acquired as a backup, wound up filling in as the Knicks’ starting center, and though the team only won 48 games in the regular season, they upset the Celtics in the playoffs and threw a scare into the Lakers — whose 33-game winning streak has been dug up and pored over again, thanks to the similarly streaking Heat — in the Finals.
“Survive and advance” is a slogan we hear an awful lot this time of the year, though it’s normally contained to the NCAA Tournament. The Knicks may think about borrowing — or bogarting — that right now. Because it certainly applies now. Starting tonight.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com