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TEP back in time with me, won’t you? It’s just a short trip, only 10 years. But for the moment, let’s pretend the calendar reads April 5, 1998. Let’s flip open a newspaper. What do we see?

n A federal judge throws out a lawsuit against President Clinton brought by Paula Corbin Jones, just as everyone is learning the proper spelling for a former intern named Monica Lewinsky.

n Times Square celebrates five years since the arrival of Walt Disney, which turned a burned-out ghost town back into New York’s No. 1 tourist trap.

n Klugman and Randall reunite to do “The Odd Couple” on Broadway, and Lemmon and Matthau reunite to do “The Odd Couple 2” on the screen, and nobody much notices either one.

n David Cone blows a 3-0 lead in Oakland, gets lit up 7-3, dropping the Yankees’ record to 0-3 on the season and officially triggering a Joe Torre Watch as people wonder if the Yanks possibly can recover from that hole. The Mets rally for three in the ninth and one in the 13th on a game-winner by the immortal Rich Becker to beat the Pirates, 7-6, improve to 3-1 on the season and spark the New York baseball question: Is this the year they take back the town?

n The Nets beat the Knicks, 97-94, solidifying their chances of making the playoffs for the first time in four years, though the Knicks remained 2 games ahead in the fight for the No. 7 seed. This is what Nets coach John Calipari has to say about Jeff Van Gundy after that game: “You see what that team has been through this year, and where they are, and it’s inspiring to you as a basketball fan, let alone as a coach. That is the kind of franchise we all want to be like.”

And that’s where we’ll bring the time machine in for a landing, because the point has been made: 10 years can seem like yesterday, or it can seem like the 16th Century, depending on how you look at it. Clinton survived, of course, and so did Times Square; only Klugman does of those four Oddfolk. The Yankees managed to squeak by with 114 wins in their next 158 games. The Mets died a horrible September death not unlike the one they endured last year.

And it’s been a good, long while maybe exactly 10 years, in fact since anyone thought to put 12 words like that together That. Is. The. Kind. Of. Franchise. We. All. Want. To. Be. Like. about the New York Knickerbockers.

There has been an entire generation of sports fan in this city that has now grown up not understanding, even a little bit, what it was to be around the Knicks, how much that team owned this city, ruled its soul, integrated into its fabric. Tell an 18-year-old college freshman that baseball season in this town didn’t really start until the Knicks’ season was done whether that was the beginning of May or the middle of June, and they look at you as if you’re speaking Aramaic.

Been a long, long time.

But not really. Not for those of us who do remember. Calipari has said a lot of ridiculous things through the years, but that one burned with truth. It was that 1997-98 season that allowed a lot of us to believe that the Knicks really were going to command our city forever, because even in a year when almost nothing went right, they still were an arresting story day after day, night after night.

Patrick Ewing played in only 26 games, after suffering a horrific hand injury in Milwaukee in December. Charles Oakley and John Starks were on their way out. The Knicks relied heavily on the likes of Chris Mills and Terry Cummings and Buck Williams, this at a time when the East was like the West is today, when Michael Jordan was in his final season of flight in Chicago.

And the Knicks still won 43 games, and made the playoffs for the 11th straight year, and won a playoff series for the seventh straight year, and went into Miami for a decisive Game 5 against the Heat and blew their doors off, 98-81. Clearly, this was a franchise that had gotten a supply of gold pixie dust and refused to be parted from it.

It didn’t end there, of course; there would be a Finals run the next year, and a return to the Eastern Finals in 2000, and the playoff streak would eventually reach 14 straight years, the playoff-series streak would reach nine, and even when the Knicks started slowly in 2001-02, it seemed simply a lull.

Not a lullaby.

And yet here we are, the failed Scott Layden administration and the failed Isiah Thomas administration having toppled and tumbled and mixed together into the mud now splotching Donnie Walsh’s shoes. Since the Raptors ousted the Knicks in the last playoff series ever coached by Jeff Van Gundy, in April of 2001, there have been seven years and four playoff games, all losses. There have been too many bad contracts to keep track of, too many mailed-in regular-season games, too many nights when “Fire Layden!” and “Fire Chaney!” and “Fire Isiah!” and “Fire Dolan!” have drowned out the music at the Garden. It doesn’t seem possible that this was the kind of franchise everyone wanted to be like. Seems like that happened during the Buchanan administration, in fact.

Ten years can fly by or they can crawl by. Depends on your point of view.

Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail address is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. His book, “1941: the Greatest Year in Sports,” is available in bookstores.

VAC’S WACKS

If you care even a little bit about golf, you already mourn the lack of worthy rivals for Tiger Woods. And once you read Ian O’Connor’s superb new book, “Arnie and Jack,” an arresting narrative about the way Palmer pushed Nicklaus and the way Nicklaus pushed Palmer, both on and off the course, it will truly hit home precisely what we’ve been missing, and what we’ll keep missing.

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I don’t want to say that dipping into that new on-line vault that Sports Illustrated has created, the one that includes all the magazine’s stories back to 1954, is addictive, but it won’t surprise me when Daniel Baldwin and Jeff Conaway show up in a press box soon, seeking to lead an intervention.

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Thirteen more episodes of “Friday Night Lights” are on the way, which is outstanding news. You know what will be even better? If those 13 look more like the 22 we got in Season 1, and a little less than the 15 we got in Season 2 before the writer’s strike performed euthanasia on a wobbly effort.

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Raise your hand if you were surprised when you saw that Mike Hampton strained his Pavano muscle the other night in Atlanta.