Not that anyone asked me, but they never do. Thus, the one sport I most miss this time of year is ice hockey, specifically the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs.

I’ve never seen a player not hustle or play hard during the playoffs. Even throughout the rare blowout, the action is intense. As a TV show, in for a minute, in for the game.

And no player places himself above the team. He wouldn’t dare betray the code. No muscle-flexing, chest banging, any acts of check-me-out immodesty.

And at the end of every series, the ritual center-ice handshake lines form, a show of respect for the game and one another.

For my two cents, the best sports photo ever taken came during a handshake line, April 8, 1952, in the Montreal Forum. The photographer, according to the late John Halligan, the Rangers’ then NHL go-to answer man, 16 years ago concluded that it was shot by Jacques Lemercier or Roger St. Jean, both with the Montreal daily “La Presse.”

That was after Game 7 of the Bruins-Canadiens semifinals. Bruins goalie “Sugar” Jim Henry’s eyes had been blackened by a broken nose suffered in Game 6. Habs star Maurice “Rocket” Richard had been knocked out, cold, in the second period of Game 7, but returned to score the winner.

Yet in an exchange of hands and direct eye contact, Henry appears to have bowed from the waist in unabashed regard, while Richard, his head bandaged and dried blood dripped from his left eye, gives Henry a stare of equal regard. It’s beyond special.

I first saw this photo — and stared at it — when I was about 10. And I know, as the sport continues to be removed from our sports — and for no good reasons — that photo continues to serve my sensibilities, 57 years later.

By the way, where did that hockey handshake tradition begin?

Figuring he had little else to do, we assigned that research to NBC’s Doc Emrick, who then passed it to Denis Gibbons, a hockey historian and member of the Society for International Hockey Research. Gibbons then passed it to Liam Maguire in Ottawa, according to Gibbons, “one of SIHR’s best historians.”

So score it Maguire from Gibbons and Emrick.

Maguire’s research shows the tradition to be more than 100 years old, starting with a charity game played in Montreal between the Cup champion Montreal Wanderers and a team of Eastern Canada Amateur Association standouts — perhaps, notes Maguire, the first All-Star game played in any sport.

The game was to benefit the widow of Wanderers star Hod Stuart, who had been killed in a swimming accident.

A newspaper clipping from that game shows players from opposing teams shaking hands — an oddity for the time, a time when hockey was under steady attack as far too violent.

Still, Maguire doesn’t know for sure, though he believes the post-series handshake became custom within 10 years of that 1908 charity match. He spoke with Hall of Famer and Canadiens star Aurèle Joliat who played in the 1920s and recalled “the handshake” as already a custom.

Not that anyone asked me.

Though the Dolan Family/Cablevision/Madison Square Garden empires have rarely if ever been popular with consumers, politicians — and from both sides — have long held Dolan operations in greater esteem than their constituents.

Late last week, Gov. Cuomo named Jimmy Dolan to his New York Re-Opening Advisory Board. Jeff Wilpon also made Cuomo’s wish list, so go figure.

In 1995, when Cablevision and ITT purchased the Garden and its teams, Gov. Mario Cuomo, at a news conference, was delighted to announce to New York the “great news,” though Cablevision’s cutthroat business practices led to far more consumer groans than grins. Gov. Cuomo’s presence and effusive praise of Cablevision seemed as inappropriate as it was preposterous

In between, in 2015, Joe Percoco, among the current Gov. Cuomo’s top aides and best pals, left the Cuomo administration to become a senior executive VP at the Garden, under Jimmy Dolan. Last year, Percoco was sentenced to six years in prison for accepting $300,000 in pocket-stuffing while employed by New York State under Cuomo.

Interesting, the mutual attraction and affection, no?

So if we read the timeline correctly, a Giants’ first-round draft pick last season, DeAndre Baker out of Georgia, allegedly developed into an armed robber with aggravated assault charges last season, his first in the NFL.

Either that or the Giants had no idea who they’d drafted.

Both Baker and alleged stickup companion Quinton Dunbar, a cornerback with Seattle, are both college men, the latter from the University of Florida. Why do the same colleges, year after year, produce the most criminal suspects? Don’t the states’ governors ever wonder? Or are they looking forward to games in the luxury suites, thus willing to dismiss it all as an unfortunate annual coincidence?

Though I understand the visceral antipathy last week directed at the Rays’ Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell for refusing to pitch at a virus-reduced pay rate, the media too often seem eager to have it both ways. If Snell said his refusal is not about the money, he’d have been ridiculed as dishonest. But that he admitted it’s about the money brought scorn.

Meanwhile, the better Snell pitches, the more media will demand that the teams pay millions more to keep him or acquire him.

Wanna do something neat Sunday night, at 7 p.m.? Link into the 92nd Street Y’s live chat with Walt Frazier, Willis Reed and Bill Bradley about the 1970 Knicks, via 92Y.org/events.

Every time the New York Times reports on some social injustice perpetrated on an innocent or suspected innocent, I think of what The Times did to the career and health of ESPN’s former but still totally innocent tennis analyst Doug Adler, and I want to retch.