Garden roars back to life with this feel-good team

THE PEOPLE rose and they roared and they were in no hurry to rush to the exits, because these are the nights when Madison Square Garden really can feel like the city’s aorta. These are the fourth-quarter nights when the Knicks remind you why pro basketball is still the core of the city’s sporting soul.

“We were feeding off the crowd,” Tim Hardaway Jr. said, a few moments after this 106-101 victory was complete.

It was Hardaway who hit the biggest shot of the night, a no-doubt-about-it 3-pointer that pushed the lead from one to four with 32 seconds left, that sent the folks into a frenzy, that made it clear the Knicks were going to outlast the Jazz on a night when it seemed certain they would never make it to the finish line.

Funny, right? For two days, Knicks fans actually reveled in a loss, and when was the last time that happened? If there’s one thing the Knicks have been proficient at these last 16 years, it’s losing, all of them stacked like cordwood on the side of the road, 774 of them since the 2001-02 season (just for a fun comparison, the Spurs had 372 losses in that time).

And yet, for two days, Knicks fans consoled themselves after watching their team build (and then blow) a 23point lead to the Cavaliers. It wasn’t that they were happy the home team lost, of course, just grateful for the first time in forever they could feel the sting of a loss so deeply. That only happens when you start to truly invest in a team. And yet … What the Knicks reminded their fans — and, as important, themselves — Wednesday night is that as much as a good loss can be helpful to the psyche, a bad win is much more enjoyable. Of course, there’s really no such thing as a “bad” win, it’s just that for most of this night the Knicks looked haphazard and lackluster, maybe a bit hung over from Monday. The Jazz picked the Knicks apart inside, outside, everywhere. They were in control. And then they weren’t. “Our defense tightened up,” Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said. “And everything else seemed to follow that. We’re trying to become a good defensive team, and hopefully this is the start of it.”

Said Hardaway, who finished with a team-high 26 points: “We did this with heart, we did this with confidence, we did this with effort.”

They did it all two days after what felt like a benchmark game against the Cavs, when they refused to be bullied but also couldn’t finish what would have been just about as feel-good a win as the Garden has seen in years.

“We knew if we didn’t play better defense we would lose the game,” Enes Kanter said. “And we didn’t want to lose this game.”

Of course, there was a time that being a Knicks fan meant, in many ways, being defined by bad, awful, soulcrushing losses that had their own names, instantly recognizable in Knicks lore. The Charles Smith Game. The Kukoc Game. The Starks Game. The Reggie Game I. The Reggie Game II. The Reggie Game III… There were others. But that’s what happens when the games matter. And for the first time in a long time, the games matter as they once did. You can hear it among your friends, asking what time the game starts, chattering again incessantly about this team. You can see it as the folks enter the Garden, double-stepping to their seats because they can’t wait for the game to start.

And you can hear it in these fourth quarters: against the Jazz on Wednesday night, against the Pacers, against the Nuggets and the Hornets. Hell, even the way the fourth quarter sounded against Cleveland was familiar, that old uncomfortable buzz, the waiting for the other shoe to drop, the abject despair when it actually dropped.

It’s all part of the grand emotional symphony of a season with consequence. And look: there’s no way of knowing exactly how long that will last. The Knicks have been blessed with a surplus of winnable home games early in this season, have responded by wining enough of them to sit 8-6 right now. They were 14-11 at one point last year, too. Caution is still the rule of the day.

But so is caring. So is attachment. You hear these fourth quarters, you listen to these starving fans, you feel the familiar old thunder rattle and hum on 33rd Street. Good losses, bad wins, all of them: it’s a hell of a time to care about basketball in this city again. A hell of a time.