NEW YORK — This was a night in Madison Square Garden that begged for that old 1990s toughness out of the home team. That made it a night to recall how those bygone Knicks ended the dynastic run of the Bad Boys Pistons with their own show of physicality and grit.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” Isiah Thomas said Thursday by phone.

In 1992, Pat Riley’s Knicks beat the Pistons in the first round of the playoffs, 3-2. “That was our last stand,” Thomas said. It was an honorable basketball death for the former two-time champs (1988-89 and 1989-90) because the Knicks promised to use Detroit’s style in their (vain) attempt to take over the NBA.

“I thought it was great how they beat us,” said Thomas, the Hall of Fame Pistons guard and former Knicks president and coach. “They beat us with our own DNA. And at the end of that series, it was all respect because of the way the Knicks played and the way they spoke about us.”

Thirty-four years later, with the rough-and-tumble Pistons being compared to their Bad Boys forebears, it was time for the 2025-26 Knicks to make their own stand against Detroit. The Pistons had beaten them by a combined 69 points in their first two regular-season meetings, and the visitors were taking the floor without their two best big men, Jalen Duren and Isaiah Stewart, suspended for (what else?) their roles in a scuffle.

What a great opportunity for the Knicks to start the post-All-Star Game portion of their schedule by hammering the Eastern Conference’s best team into submission, giving Detroit something to think about in the spring when they might fight for the right to go to the Finals.

Instead, the Knicks played with preseason urgency.

“It’s not a fun feeling,” first-year coach Mike Brown said after Detroit’s 126-111 victory, fueled by Cade Cunningham’s magical 42-point, 13-assist performance.

“Just not up to our standards,” said Jalen Brunson, who scored 33.

This effort wasn’t within a hundred country miles of the championship standard the Knicks have allegedly committed to. Owner James Dolan and president Leon Rose ran out Tom Thibodeau in favor of Brown for the felony of twice losing to Indiana in the playoffs, and for supposedly better ticker-tape odds this time around.

While the Pacers are busy rehabbing this year as the conference’s worst team, the Pistons represent an existential threat to the Knicks’ grand designs. The Knicks are seven games behind top-seeded Detroit with 26 games to play and won’t be making up that ground. They will have to win that playoff series — if they even advance deep enough and see the Pistons — on the road.

Good luck with that after the short-handed Pistons, with 6-foot-9 Paul Reed as their tallest starter, reduced Karl-Anthony Towns to a relative non-entity, holding him to two points in the first half while Detroit took a 58-48 lead.

Towns got it going in the third quarter, and his final numbers (21 points, 11 rebounds) suggested he put in a solid night’s work. But the box score was a liar. Without Duren and Stewart to tangle with, Towns should’ve dominated this game. Instead, the 2015 No. 1 pick allowed the combination of Reed (making his 36th start in six NBA years) and Tolu Smith (making his eighth career start on a salary of $636,000) to outscore him by one.

Listen, the Knicks do have a little history on their side here. Detroit won three of their four regular-season games last year, and none of that made a difference in the playoffs. The Pistons made the Knicks sweat in a challenging first-round series, yet when it mattered most, Brunson defeated Detroit’s best perimeter defender, Ausar Thompson.

In the closing seconds of a tied Game 6, Brunson held the ball near midcourt with Thompson all over him, then dribbled to his left before hitting the brakes hard and putting the Detroit wing on skates. Brunson bounced the ball between his legs from back to front, took two dribbles to his right and launched a 3-pointer as a scrambling Thompson tried to challenge it.

Brunson stepped into the swish with 4.3 seconds left like a golfer walking a long putt into the hole, then, with three fingers extended, blew a kiss to the enemy crowd. He was kissing the Pistons goodbye with a 40-point performance that sent the Knicks into a second-round duel with the Celtics that they would win.

But this year’s Pistons and this year’s Cunningham are so much better than last year’s. And they are in complete control of the conference largely because of the old-school basketball they so dearly love to play.

“They’re the one team in the NBA right now that is really playing a totally different brand of basketball than everyone else,” said Thomas, who is currently an NBA TV analyst. “They have gone back to what I would say the old Pistons DNA has been — defense, rebounding, shot blocking and taking good shots.

“It’s a formula that goes totally against the grain of the NBA, and it’s just like we did it in the 1980s and ’90s. When Cade sees Stewart and Duren open in the post, he actually throws them the ball. They try to score two points rather than always shooting 3s. The way I was taught the game, you want to put at least one point on the board every time down the court, and the Pistons play that way. That’s why the entire city of Detroit appreciates this team.”

These Pistons aren’t exactly the Bad Boy Pistons, who went back-to-back under Chuck Daly and regularly assaulted Michael Jordan and a parade of lesser lights who dared to drive to the goal. And yet they resemble those teams enough to be considered a legitimate title threat.

The Knicks added Jose Alvarado and Jeremy Sochan for the kind of supplemental toughness and energy on defense that, in theory, should help against the Pistons. They didn’t help Thursday night, when the home team played soft and missed 3-pointers from all over the place.

“For sure, it’s not the end of the world,” Brown said.

For sure, it will feel like it in May if the Knicks don’t get a whole lot tougher between now and then.