NBA

HEARTACHE PROOF OF RISING EXPECTATIONS

ONE shot after another clanged off the rim, and the scoreboard kept getting away from the Knicks, along with the game, along with the night, and this is where the noise started to build, and started to grow, and started to fill Madison Square Garden. It was an odd noise, unfamiliar, all but impossible to remember unless you scratched your head and searched your brain.

And then, like the name of a forgotten old friend, it was back.

“Disappointment,” Quentin Richardson said. “Deep, hurting disappointment.”

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He was referring to what was roiling in his own heart last night, maybe half an hour after the Knicks had fallen in overtime to the Mavericks, 124-114. He was talking about the shaken heads and pounded fists that had filled the dressing room like an off-key symphony ever since the final buzzer had sounded.

But he could have been talking about the Garden itself, about the 19,271 folks who’d watched it all with wide eyes and open throats and, ultimately, sunken spirits. This was a disappointing loss, a dispiriting loss, a head-scratching loss, a Maalox-guzzling loss, the kind of loss that stays with you when you step out into Seventh Avenue, when you duck into Penn Station, when you cross the GW Bridge.

And you know something?

That, as much as anything, tells you a little something about what these Knicks have been able to accomplish just shy of one-eighth of the way through their season, 10 games into what has already been a more enjoyable basketball experience than most Knicks fans have known in nearly a decade.

As much as the Knicks have electrified this basketball-starved populace with their frantic, manic, up-and-down, back-and-forth, seven-seconds-or-less approach to the game, for all the good will they’ve already engendered with their six victories to date and as much get-em-next-time resolve as they’ve collected in their three previous losses, it was this game, this night – this defeat – which may have shown just how willing New York City really is to fall back in love with pro basketball – and the Knicks – again.

“We played well enough to win in regulation,” Mike D’Antoni said with a shoulder shrug of his own. “We should have won in regulation.”

They led by seven, 112-105, when Richardson scored on a driving reverse with 2:26 to go, bringing the Garden to its collective feet and pushing the struggling Mavs to the edge of the abyss . . . and that was the last field goal they scored in the final seven minutes and 26 seconds of regulation and overtime. The lid went on, the ball stayed out, the Mavs made a stand, and Dirk Nowitzki played like the MVP he was just two skinny years ago.

And that was that, except for the lingering, nagging aggravation in the pits of players, coaches and, most especially, the people who watched it. Look, if there’s one thing that hasn’t been in short supply around here lately it’s losses. There have been plenty of losses, all kinds of losses: bad losses and worse losses, embarrassing losses and humiliating losses, losses that made you want to take your 9-iron to your TV screen and losses that made you want to renounce your New York basketball citizenship.

But when was the last loss that made you feel this way, that filled you with disappointment because you’ve started to expect better, because you’d actually allowed yourself to hope again, to believe again?

“You learn from everything,” David Lee said. “At this point, you can still learn from losses as much as wins.”

For the players. And for everyone else. Knicks fans, learning to care again, can write off the extra few points of their diastolic reading last night to the collateral damage of this wonderful news: The Knicks can make you madder than hell again. Thank goodness.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com