Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NBA

Snake-bitten Knicks can’t catch break

The illusion was powerful enough. The Pacers were in the house. The Knicks were in the house. Toward the end, after refusing to buy in for most of the previous 47 minutes and 51 seconds, there was plenty of rancor and roar from the 19,812 people inside Madison Square Garden.

You could talk yourself into it. You could. You could squint a little bit, shove the pages on the calendar back a little bit, turn late winter into the middle of spring, the Knicks and the Pacers staring at each other on equal footing, a couple of legit challengers in the east, a couple of contenders you could talk yourself into, exchanging blows, delivering haymakers …

And then, of course, reality.

Then, of course, there was Paul George — who else but Paul George? — chucking up a 3, and of course here was Iman Shumpert tickling George’s elbow — “Joey [Crawford] made the right call,” Mike Woodson would later admit — and of course George made all three free throws and, well …

“It feels like we’re stuck in the mud,” Carmelo Anthony would say later, this disheartening 103-96 overtime loss long in the books, “but we’ll get out of it.”

It is good the Knicks player feels this way, particularly on a night when he had 30 points and 18 rebounds (and was again treated as a pedestrian ham-and-egger by the referee’s whistles), particularly on a night when it was easy to start to wonder about this team, easy to start to worry, even in an Atlantic Division that is starting to look like it’ll require fewer wins to clinch than the NFC East.

Still, it really is fair to wonder and worry, to seek words like “culture” and “habit,” when you begin to sense the pattern of pathos that can dog an entire season. It’s when you get to see a team like the Pacers up close, when you see how they figured out a way to beat the Knicks at the Garden Wednesday night.

And when you see the Knicks up close, too.

Showing an equal resolve finding a way to lose.

The people walking the stairwells and corridors afterward talked of similar laments: Shumpert’s “soft” foul of George; or George flicking on his superstar radar in overtime; or lamenting the early 13-0 lead that seemed to vanish in an eyeblink; or Andrea Bargnani disappearing just as it seemed he was beginning to alter the way the Garden looks at him.

And that stuff hurts, sure.

But this is what’s starting to take hold around the Knicks: a familiar old whiff of losing, of fatalism, of what’s-going-to-happen-this-time. And it arrives at the worst possible time. These 11 games were supposed to be warm-ups, visits by the Spurs and Rockets and Pacers sprinkled among a batch of winnable games. Even after Tyson Chandler was hurt, you felt 6-5 was within reach — and in the desultory Atlantic Division, that might have been enough to start calculating magic numbers.

But the record is 3-8 now. The schedule drags the Knicks to Washington this weekend, and to the West Coast thereafter, and with the distinct possibility they could be staring at something like 3-12 heading into December. Again: in the Atlantic, with the Nets mirroring their every misstep, that won’t finish them.

But by then, you could be staring at some kind of abyss.

By then, you could be talking about a seven-game losing streak, and about any manner of methods to lose basketball game: from behind, from ahead, in heartbreaking fashion and mind-numbing fashion, enough losing to make a team wonder if it can really hit the brakes and slam the ride into reverse.

But there was more than that, especially if you allowed your mind to drift during this game, these two teams battling, just as they did six months ago.

“It would have been a nice win for our ball club against the best team in basketball,” Woodson said. “But we didn’t get it done.”

Earlier, in the locker room, Woodson had tried to remind the Knicks that it wasn’t that long ago when they were the Pacers, when they were off to a scorching-hot start, when they were, at worst, in the Pacers’ class. And for 47 minutes and 51 seconds, it seemed to roust the Knicks to action.

Unfortunately, on this night, the game lasted 53 minutes. Too much time. Too few answers. With a long road ahead.