NBA

Knicks forgotten title team move into spotlight tonight

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This is supposed to be the deal, right? You win a championship in New York, you’re remembered forever. You walk into the saloon or eatery of the moment — Toots Shor’s, Foley’s, Mr. Laff’s, wherever — and you put your wallet away because your money’s no good.

Ask the ’55 Dodgers. Ask the ’94 Rangers. Ask the ’86 Mets. Ask any iteration of championship Yankees or Giants teams. Hell, there are members of the ’70s-era Cosmos who can bring a room to a halt.

It’s funny, though:

The 1973 Knicks? Well, let Walt Frazier explain it.

“Sometimes,” Clyde says, “it seems as though people forget we won a second championship. Almost like it never happened.”

OK. At this point it’s probably worthwhile to point out that many of the men who won that ’73 championship, who upset the 68-win Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals and beat the defending-champion Lakers in the Finals, were also part of the 1969-70 champions.

And that’s a team that’s received no shortage of love and tribute through the years. At last count, there were over 100 books written through the years dealing exclusively with that team. Probably the best was “The City Game,” by Pete Axthelm, whose penultimate paragraph reads thus: “Even if the championship should pass on, the significance of the achievement will endure, in everyone who played and watched and felt it.”

Axthelm could have no idea how prescient he was. Those ’70 Knicks reduce even hardened New Yorkers to poetry, to lyrical remembrances of selflessness and all-for-one and hit-the-open-man. It is probably no exaggeration to say that no single New York championship team has ever been as beloved as the ’69-70 Knicks.

And so the ’73 Knicks fall through the cracks.

That won’t be the case tonight. Tonight, those Knicks will get their due, will stand together again 40 years after hanging a second banner at the Garden — the most recent banner, if you haven’t heard — will be recognized and regaled (or, as Clyde might put it, toasted and boasted) while the 2013 Knicks, quite appropriately, play the Milwaukee Bucks, one of the teams those ’70s-era Knicks always measured themselves against.

You can theorize all you want about why the ’70 team is always the one that gets all the attention. It was the first champion, which is a place it will always have, and that matters. There was the 18-game winning streak early in the season which established its dominance (and set a record at the time).

There was the remarkable comeback in Game 5 of the Finals, after Willis Reed crumpled in a pile on the floor, and Willis limping through the tunnel before Game 7, and Clyde’s forever 36-point, 19-assist masterpiece that clinched the title. Cazzie Russell was on that team, and Mike Riordan, and Dick Barnett was a stalwart.

By ’73 the Knicks had added Jerry Lucas. Phil Jackson, who had missed the ’70 season with a bad back, played, and was a key reserve. Rice High School’s Dean (The Dream) Meminger joined the backcourt. But the biggest alteration, of course, was the arrival of Earl Monroe which, in the context of the times, was similar to LeBron James deciding to join Dwyane Wade rather than try to beat him.

You could start a hell of a bar debate by making the case for the ’73 team actually being better than the ’70 team, and you could also make an awfully strong case for yourself. That ’73 team’s roster was deeper, and its core was tested and tough. It won an epic Easter Sunday game at the Garden against the Celtics in double overtime in the East Finals, then became the first team to ever win a Game 7 at Boston Garden (though John Havlicek was a shell of himself thanks to an injured arm).

And in a sign of the times, one of the things that might have actually hurt the ’73 team was a truth of the times: Game 5 of the Finals, the clincher, aired live. But that meant a 7:30 start Los Angeles time, 10:30 in New York, and on a Thursday night in May only college students and insomniacs were still going strong when Bill Bradley jumped into Reed’s arms, a moment captured forever by the lens of George Kalinsky.

A moment the Garden will celebrate tonight. No cracks to slip through. Just one lone, echoing chorus of thanks.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com