There is nothing to be gained by sugarcoating what happened Tuesday night in Dallas, so we won’t even try. That … that was a brutal loss. An epic loss. The Knicks played their very best basketball of the year — full of heart, fully of fight, full of energy — for 47 ½ minutes at American Airlines Center. They were dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on their most invigorating win of the year.

And then. Well …

As ESPN tweeted out not long after Mavericks 126, Knicks 121 (OT): NBA teams were 0-13,884 when trailing by at least nine points with 35 or fewer seconds remaining. With 33.9 seconds left, Deuce McBride made two free throws to put the Knicks up 112-103.

Twenty minutes or so later, that number was 1-13,884.

“We gotta win that,” Immanuel Quickley said.

So yes: There is nothing good about what happened in Big D, even if you want to credit Luka Doncic and his 60-point, 21-rebound, 10-assist masterpiece, a performance for the ages that should’ve been a losing-cause footnote, much as RJ Barrett’s 44-point effort was wasted last Friday night against the Bulls at the Garden.

Yes. Until around 11 o’clock Tuesday night, that Bulls loss four nights earlier stood as the most gut-wrenching loss of the season. It was a nice 96-hour run for that one, a gruesome 118-117 loss in which the Knicks shot free throws like the ninth-runner-up at a St. Vincent DePaul contest.

The Knicks have followed an eight-game winning streak with a four-game losing streak. In the space of seven days they surrendered so much of the good feeling accrued during that winning stretch and are back to 18-17, with a chance Thursday night in San Antonio to retreat to .500 and further reinforce the consensus opinion that this team is a 41-41 record waiting to happen. A quintessential NBA treadmill team.

But if you can clear your way through the cobwebs of misery that have engulfed this team the last four games, it is possible to hear the whisper of something better, something real, as long as they can avoid falling headfirst into the vortex.

Nothing is easy for the Knicks right now. RJ Barrett is out a week with a finger injury. Jalen Brunson is day-to-day but he’s already walking around like a one-man triage unit. The NBA is unforgiving. Just as the Knicks have feasted on shorthanded teams — remember the glorious 38-point stomping over the Steph-less Warriors just eight days ago? — they are now scrambling and scuffling. Nobody is immune from that.

But if there is an encouraging sign it is this: Forced to step up and assume a larger burden than any of them ever has before, the Knicks’ youthful troika of Quickley, McBride and Quentin Grimes have mostly been terrific.

Quickley subbed for Grimes last week against Toronto and drained six 3s; he subbed for Brunson at Dallas and had 11 first-half assists (he had 15 for the game). Grimes has emerged as an essential Knick; he had 33 against the Mavs and over his last 10 games is averaging 15.3 points and shooting .490/.438/.750. And McBride sank five out of six free throws down the stretch, doing his part to help stave off disaster Tuesday.

(Also: Julius Randle, forced back by circumstance to being the undisputed alpha dog right now, played mostly brilliantly before clearly becoming gassed in overtime)

“I’m proud of the guys.” Grimes said in the postgame shock of the loser’s locker room Tuesday night. “Proud of me, Deuce, Julius, the way we handled it, [Quickley], a lot of young guys going in there and fighting as much as we can.”

The Knicks will need more of that. There is no choice. There is no pause button in the NBA, and if things aren’t always perfect that’s part of the cost of membership. The Knicks have two winnable games ahead of them on this trip — at the 11-23 Spurs, at the 10-24 Rockets — and even in a reduced state it is vital that they face this crucible as they did Tuesday. They cannot let a four-game skid become six, or 10, or 12, which is so easy to do once the NBA grind takes effect.

Seasons are reduced to dust that way. The Knicks’ season doesn’t have to go that way. In crisis they have received reinforcements; now those hopeful bits of optimism have to translate to the scoreboard. It can get away from you in a hurry.