And as for the other team in town …

OK, OK, we kid. If it is indisputable the Nets’ star-splashed Sunday made significant strides in their perpetual effort to gain equal footing with the Knicks, it is equally unarguable that the Knicks still remain the prime holders of the deed to the city’s basketball soul.

A quick and thoroughly unscientific canvassing of Knicks fans The Day After didn’t reveal much of a groundswell of dug-in Knicks fans looking to trade their orange-and-blue gear for black-and-white. Knicks fans may have spent a lot of these hours questioning their sanity and their loyalty, wondering when they became so proficient at self-loathing, but the bylaws mostly require faith and trust that better days lie ahead.

So the Knicks have that going for them.

But one thing is for certain in this brave new world of Nets Ascent: Nothing is forever. If the Knicks remain the dominant basketball team, the grip they’ve had on the city’s basketball lapels is as tenuous as it’s been in their 73 years of existence.

More than ever, the Knicks need this:

They need to provide proof — genuine testimony — that it isn’t just about their words (too often empty) and their intentions (too often fickle) and their hopes (too often stitched in fantasy).

They need to show their fans evidence of genuine, abiding competence. They need to be right about the way they reacted to the reality that Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving are headed to Brooklyn, and not Manhattan, by signing up a gaggle of secondary and tertiary players, all of whom come with terrific reputations for hard work and professionalism.

That’s nice, yes.

But Scott Perry and Steve Mills also need for Julius Randle, Taj Gibson, Bobby Portis, Wayne Ellington, Reggie Bullock and Elfrid Payton — have we left anyone out? — to be more than solid citizens. They need to team with the incumbents and with RJ Barrett to prove that 2019-20 will be more than another empty slog to the lottery. They don’t have anything close to the star power that the Nets’ haul does. They also don’t have to. Make the Knicks watchable again. Make the Garden fun again. That’s their mission.

And that will allow Perry and Mills to acquire the most meaningful capital they so desperately need: credibility. That is the gaping hole in the Knicks’ foundation right now, and as much as James Dolan’s army of flacks, hacks and apologists would steer you otherwise, the Knicks won’t get well again until that abscess is duly patched.

It says here Perry and Mills have done exactly what they should’ve done from the moment they did the right thing draft night and made Barrett a cornerstone. That includes taking a pass on Durant and his troublesome Achilles, no matter the details of how that jilting took place. And it includes doing what they’ve done with the famous pile of cap space they had, using it to upgrade a woeful roster, doing it on mostly low-risk and short-term deals.

There will always be a crowd of folks who value assets and draft picks over anything else, and the Knicks could have gone that way but to what end? We saw how the last month played out — close but no stogie in the lottery, KD’s game-changing injury — and how volatile those things are in the real world. And many of those same folks decry the fair argument that the Knicks always care more about every season except the one they’re competing in. No. We need to know — the league needs to know — that Perry and Mills know what they’re doing. Soon, we will.

It isn’t easy what they’re trying to do. The leak that hinted the Knicks didn’t make a full max offer to Durant didn’t help them one little bit, and surely came from above them. Dolan himself, in an inexcusable bit of unearned hubris, also did them no favors back in March.

“We can’t respond because of the NBA rules, etc.,” Dolan told Michael Kay on ESPN Radio. “But that doesn’t stop them from telling us, and they do. I can tell you, from what we’ve heard, I think we’re gonna have a very successful offseason when it comes to free agents.”

Take this to the bank: He wasn’t talking about Reggie Bullock.

But that’s part of the mission, too. Perry and Mills need to prove they know what they are doing while doing all of it in the shadow of an owner who will be a millstone around their necks until he isn’t, until fans can again worry more about men who play for the team and less about the one who owns it. Maybe this was a first step toward that day becoming a reality.

Really, there is no other way for the other team in town to root.