One by one the old Knicks, the Knicks of the 1960s and ’70s,  left. Earl Monroe was still around until 1980. But Walt Frazier was gone to Cleveland. Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley had retired one by one, Bradley staying around the longest, through 1977. But Red Holzman coached on, all the way into the early ’80s himself, pushed aside once when Reed became the coach and then coming back later. Even then, without the horses he used to have, sitting next to him at the end of the press table and watching him coach a game was still like taking a master class in how you were supposed to do it, even if he never talked very much about the old days unless you asked.

But did from time to time when it was the two of us. By the way? I can tell you it was one of the honors of my career in this business getting to know Red Holzman as well as I did.

“What was it like in the city once you started winning?” I asked one day at his house in Cedarhurst.

Red smiled. Of course he was the quiet basketball lifer out of the 1950s and the old Rochester Royals who ended up being the leader of that remarkable basketball band, as famous as any the sport has ever seen.

“The only way I can describe it,” he said, “is that all of a sudden, it was just something bigger than all of us.”

That is what has happened with this Knicks team, with Jalen Brunson as their Clyde and Karl-Anthony Towns as Willis and OG Anunoby as DeBusschere. Something happened and something started — and something sure changed — when they were down 1-2 to the Hawks. Now it has turned into … this. Bigger than all of them. And not just here.

I got an email the other day from a wonderful writer I know, S.A. Cosby, out of Virginia, whose last novel was a big hit called “King of Ashes.” Here is what he wrote:

“I’ve been a Bullets/Wizards fan for a long time. I’m living vicariously through the Knicks.”

There have been other teams, and other big New York sports stories like this, without question. There have been other high times. There were the Rangers of ’94 and Joe Torre’s Yankees when they started their own winning in October of ’96. There were the Mets of ’69, and then later with them, that crazy loud October of ’86. There were the Jersey Giants of Super Bowl XLII, and what they did to Belichick and Brady and the Patriots when the Patriots were 18-0. And always, there will be Joe Namath and Super Bowl III.

But sports keeps getting bigger, year by year and sometimes hour by hour. You can’t script these moments, the way you could never in a million years script 13 wins in a row in the playoffs. Sports doesn’t just have the element of surprise going for it, when the next moment is the one that changes everything. On top of that, sports has always had the ability to fill its own vacuums, here and everywhere else. We didn’t know we had this kind of Knicks team until we suddenly did at the end of April, when everything did change. And the whole thing just kept building until it exploded into a night like Wednesday night, when they came from 29 down to beat the Spurs. And then everywhere you went the next morning around here there was always a Knicks fan who wanted to talk all about it, usually with a simple refrain that is everywhere these days:

“How about the Knicks?”

Even with the times when the city has turned into Stupidville, the way it did after Game 4 when Knicks fans were throwing eggs at Victor Wembanyama, this has mostly been as thrilling a ride as the city has known in sports. This team, and this story — and mostly they have played the game — have touched the great beating heart that is sports in New York.

And again and again: It is a basketball story most of all. It is about the city game, chronicled so beautifully long ago by the late Pete Axthelm in his book of that name. The great William Goldman, author of “The Princess Bride” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” and so many other books and movies, was my dear friend and mentor for the last 40 years of his life and like an honorary third grandfather to our children. The first time I ever met him was when I was covering Wimbledon in the late ’70s, and he was there near an outside court with his own dear friend, Dave DeBusschere.

Goldman became a Knicks season holder in 1970, and ended up sitting under one of the baskets at the Garden, living and dying with them after that until the day he died, suffering through so many lost seasons in the 1980s before Dave Checketts hired Pat Riley, and then again across the first 15 years or so of this decade.

But even though all the losing, a night would come along when the Knicks would win a game, just one, and the Garden was alive. My phone would ring around 10 the next morning and Bill would exclaim, “Did you watch?” No matter how bad it got at the Garden on all those other nights, he always believed that someday there might be another team like this. Now there is. He would have loved it all as much as anyone, and probably more.

This isn’t about the vulgar prices now being charged to get into the building and Celebrity Row. This is about the fans who were there, and packing the house through all the lost seasons before Leon Rose and Tom Thibodeau and then Mike Brown, about Jalen Brunson and KAT and OG; about fans who go all the way back to the ’70s the way Bill did, and the ones who lived and died with the Knicks of the ’90s, when they were making their own run under Riley and then Jeff Van Gundy. My oldest son, Christopher, was at the Garden the night Larry Johnson made his 4-point play against the Pacers, in another basketball June, in 1999, the last time the Knicks made the NBA Finals before they finally made it back this time.

Chris was nearly seven when the Knicks went to Game 7 against the Rockets in 1994. He was nearly 12 when the Knicks went back in ’99. And he said something on Thursday morning, after Game 4, that John McEnroe, who was a kid when the Knicks won it all in ’73, has been saying over the past few days.

“We had all those teams in the ‘90s,” my son said. “I honestly thought it was going to be like that every year.”

Until it wasn’t.

Until … this. Bigger than all of them. Big as the big city.

How about the Knicks?

THE REALITY OF CELEBRITY ROW, HART IS ALL-TIME GLUE GUY & NICE DOESN’T HIT FOR AVERAGE …

It really has become become a new reality series:

“Knick Fans of Celebrity Row.”

My heart beats faster just thinking about all of them, no kidding.

Only a judge dumber than a bag of hammers would issue an injunction to let a college kid who admitted betting on his own team play for Texas Tech this season.

Or play for any college team, ever again.

That there are actually people trying to turn this guy – the name is Brendan Sorsby — into some kind of victim is just as dumb as that injunction.

You know who wait outside team hotels and throw eggs at the players?

Punks.

Not being passionate about their team.

Or showing team spirit.

Punks.

Maybe local media didn’t really need to turn Victor Wembanyama into the world’s tallest version of Al Capone, after all.

Everybody around here seems to have forgotten the way some of Coach Riley’s Knicks played the game back in the day.

There has never been a law passed that says there is justice in sports.

But there sure was justice the other night when Josh Hart’s miss didn’t cost his team Game 4.

Because there has never been a better teammate, on any Knicks team you care to mention, than Hart.

Glue Guy for all times.

Coming into the weekend:

White Sox in first place.

Red Sox in last place.

Mets in last place.

If you’re keeping score at home, the White Sox had lost 324 games in the three seasons before this one.

You don’t have to love hockey to love what we’ve seen from the Hurricanes and the Golden Knights.

It’s become sort of official at this point in his career that the Dale Carnegie Courses (I checked, they’re still being offered) just aren’t ever going to take with John Tortorella.

Speaking of which:

Now that Jimmy Dolan has moved on from fighting with — and obsessing about — the media, he’s moved on to the mayor.

If you’re born round … you do the rest.

Anthony Volpe is a sweetheart of a young man.

It is a well-established fact that his manager loves him the way little children love puppies.

Volpe also came into the weekend batting .194.

After batting .212 in 153 games a year ago.

Jalen Brunson’s miss at the end of Game 4 might be the most famous miss in basketball since Dereck Whittenburg of N.C. State missed that shot against Houston in ’83 before Lorenzo Charles put it back for Jimmy V’s team.

Maybe over the summer Timothee Chalamet can find a new hobby.

Wouldn’t it be something if the U.S. men’s team makes a run in the World Cup?