As long as he is willing (to pay the fines) and able (to play at a sky-high level), Kyrie Irving should continue to accept Boston’s profane terms of engagement.

As long as he remains inspired to score another 39 points in Game 2, including another 18 in the fourth quarter, Irving should continue in the role of pro-wrestling heel Wednesday night and, in his words, embrace the dark side of his rivalry with his former team.

Whatever works, by all means, even if the point guard ends up another 50 or 75 grand lighter in the wallet. Irving went toe-to-toe with the Celtics crowd last spring, and came away the victor in five relatively easy games. If TD Garden venom is his rocket fuel once again this year, and powers the Nets back to the Eastern Conference semis, then Irving should go ahead and match the fans’ thoughts with some of his own.

The league office sure feels differently, and hit Irving, a multi-zillionaire, with the equivalent of a parking ticket for “making obscene gestures on the playing court and directing profane language toward the spectator stands.” Though the Nets star earned the $50,000 penalty just on his unnecessarily vulgar response to a halftime heckler while heading to the locker room, every athlete deserves some leeway if subjected to degrading and sometimes dehumanizing taunts. As long as Irving doesn’t get physical with any paying customer, and as long as he limits his responses to F-bombs and occasional middle fingers, what’s really the problem here?

And this isn’t just a Boston thing. Truth is, it’s more of a Northeast thing. As Jeff Van Gundy once said about fan-base sensibilities in sports, you have Boston, New York and Philly, and everywhere else is Club Med.

Case in point: Earlier this month, while exiting the Madison Square Garden court at halftime, Irving heard a Knicks fan say something unpleasant enough to make him stop on a dime, and turn back to confront the alleged offender. As it turned out, Irving tapped an apparently innocent bystander on the shoulder, and later apologized in a postgame press conference for confronting the wrong man.

“I’ve dealt with this East Coast type of attitude in games since I was 7, 8 years old,” Irving said that night. “So I’ve been in the trenches, as they would say, growing up … being a Jersey kid not getting respect from New York basketball until I just stopped giving an ‘F’ about what their opinion was and I just started repping the best way I knew how.”

Irving has said that he was “raised as a survivor,” that his family “comes practically from the bottom” of South Bronx public housing, and that he’d spent his youth crossing the Hudson every weekend to prove himself in the city’s toughest playgrounds. And yet when one Duke official explained Irving’s high-maintenance ways during his one injury-shortened season of college hoops, that official didn’t blame New York. “There is a lot of Jersey in Kyrie,” he said. “A lot of Jersey.”

Jersey attitude plus Bronx swagger would probably equal trouble in Boston under any circumstances. But long before he stepped on the midcourt leprechaun logo following last year’s Game 4, Irving was also guilty of giving half-assed efforts and making half-assed promises as a Celtic — meaning, of course, that the TD Garden fans have every right to let him know about it whenever he takes the floor. Truth is, they had far more reason to go after Irving than, say, Knicks fans had to assail Trae Young.

On the other hand, Irving is right when he says “there’s only but so much you can take as a competitor.” It’s hard to get worked up about what the children are hearing in the stands from players when their parents, or nearby parents, are shouting things at Irving that would bring a drunken sailor to shame. No athlete should be forbidden from cursing out a courtside stranger who mistakenly thought the price of admission included a free pass to berate and malign that athlete from point-blank range — without the possibility of a rebuttal.

Of course, there should be one exception to this rule: If a ballplayer’s performance is negatively impacted by heckling the hecklers, then that ballplayer needs to hit the mute button ASAP and recommit to the team’s singular mission of winning. But Irving wasn’t negatively impacted in Game 1. In fact, the crowd’s expressed hate (and his overly conspicuous replies to it) elevated him to a higher level of play.

You could argue that Irving dribbled himself into traffic and into trouble on Brooklyn’s final, failed possession, and that he should have taken the shot rather than pass and put Kevin Durant in a near-impossible situation, thereby costing the Nets their chance to secure victory. But to argue that his back-and-forth with the fans contributed to that sequence would be to ignore what he accomplished throughout the game and, especially, those final 12 minutes.

Irving is playing harder against the Celtics than he ever played for them. If he needs to keep cursing out the people who are cursing him out to maintain his intensity, he should let it rip.