IT’S quiet around here. It’s too quiet. It’s springtime, and baseball has blossomed, and people are fretting about the Yankees and they’re killing the Mets and all of that is right on time. But baseball is a year-round thing for us here. It’s king in October. It reigns unchallenged in the summer.

It’s supposed to share the stage in the spring. Except in this spring, this terribly eerie, terribly quiet spring, when there is a very good chance that every other sporting outlet will be muffled and silenced within a few days of Tax Day. It’s funny. We spend so much time talking about baseball, discussing it, arguing about it, it’s easy to forget that every spring up until this year, we’ve had something good and dramatic, going all the way back to 1993, the spring when Charles Smith couldn’t make that lay-up against the Bulls and the Islanders made their last great playoff push, stunning Mario Lemieux’ Penguins along the way.

Think of it. In ’94, the Knicks and Rangers took turns taking us on splendid dueling roller coaster rides all across April, May and June. In ’95, the Devils won the Cup, and Patrick Ewing missed that finger roll against the Pacers. In ’96, the Knicks went out kicking and screaming against the 72-win Bulls, in ’97 there was that remarkable series with the Heat where half the team served suspensions (and the Rangers made their last serious playoff run), in ’98 they beat the Heat without Ewing (and tried to scare the Pacers with him) and in ’99 they made that forever run to the NBA Finals.

In 2000, the Devils won a second Cup, and in 2001 came within one game of doing it again, and in 2003 finally did win Cup No. 3. In 2002 and 2003, the Nets blitzed their way through the East before coming up dry in the Finals, and even last year, as the Devils fizzled early, the Nets took the eventual champs, the Pistons, all the way to Game 7 after having Game 6 on their racket, at home.

And now …

That sound you hear are empty arenas all over the area. At the Nassau Coliseum, it seems like the last time you heard anything remotely interesting was the last time Billy Joel and Elton John teamed up there. At the Garden, you have one team (the Rangers) that hasn’t played a game in nearly a year and another team (the Knicks) that everyone wishes would take a semester or two off, just to stop harassing us with their relentlessly unwatchable and uninspired approach to basketball.

And at the Meadowlands, where the Devils lie in state, we have the only team with a chance of breathing any kind of life into our spring (other than the Yankees, of course), in the Nets, who may be sputtering and wheezing as they try to make their final playoff push, but at least have something worth sputtering and wheezing over. Yes. It’s quiet. It’s too quiet.

We were promised something different by the boys over at the Garden, by Jim Dolan and by Isiah Thomas, by the folks who thought getting swept out of the playoffs last year four straight was a certain harbinger of great things to come. In a ridiculously soft division, the Knicks seemed certain to figure out a way to earn the No. 3 seed. Only a few things happened along the way.

Lenny Wilkens got himself good and fired. Allan Houston solidified himself as the grandest waste of money since the government started paying $1,000 for a hammer. Thomas made a rash of trading deadline deals that somehow managed to make this dull, disinterested team even duller, even more disinterested. Stephon Marbury played splendidly, but on most nights was surely wondering if he still had that old ankle tape he used with the Nets, the one that had “All” on the left and “Alone” on the right.

The way the Knicks have slept through the past few weeks has been nothing short of a disgrace, and nothing short of a shameful indictment on the brand of player Thomas has assembled here. The season can’t end fast enough at the Garden. The Nets? The Nets are the team that can salvage our spring, even if it turns out to be only a cameo. The Nets are already rife with what-ifs, most of them focused on Richard Jefferson’s extended absence, and the delicious possibility of all that might have happened if Jefferson, Jason Kidd and Vince Carter had been able to spend most of the season together.

If they do get in, the Nets’ likely destination is eighth, and they are in no better position to eliminate Shaq now than they were when he was a Laker three years ago. But if they ever faced someone else well, it would be something to look forward to. It would be something to enliven the spring. And after so many springs across so many years, we’ve grown spoiled by the prospect. The Nets are our only shot.

(Mike Vaccaro’s email address is WriteBackVac@aol.com. His book, “Emperors and Idiots,” about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, is available at bookstores everywhere.)

VAC’SWHACKS

You think it would have killed Roy Williams to mention that Matt Doherty was the one who was nice enough to assemble the championship-caliber team that he had the good fortune to inherit at Chapel Hill? One of these days, by the way, someone else will take a chance on Doherty, and they will be awfully glad that they did.

It really isn’t easy being a Mets fan, is it? By the way, at the risk of treading on Mushnick’s copyright, how cool would it be if Mike Piazza ran hard every time out of the box? Or at least, you know, half the time?

The only way a featured act could look more dead at the Garden than the Knicks have looked lately is if someone could book an all-star band of Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Croce, Mama Cass and Keith Moon. Although people might actually want to pay to see that. Big difference.

You know what we call Billy Casper on the courses where I whittle away the summer? A ringer.