The home portion of the Knicks’ schedule ends Sunday night at Madison Square Garden, and for what feels like the 70th year in a row, the sad procession of true believers and diehards will file in to the arena, they will fill every seat, they will cheer out of loyalty and boo out of habit.

Then the final buzzer will sound.

And the faithful will file out, they will get on their trains, they will get their cars in the neighboring parking garages, and they will settle in for another torturous two-month run in which they watch other teams in other cities engage in the kind of splendid basketball warfare that we used to believe was our birthright.

And, damn it all: It will hurt missing out on all of that.

Again.

Pete Axthelm is a writing hero of mine. We attended the same high school, and one glorious football Sunday in the fall of 1983, he took me and my classmate Jim Winkler — editor of Tarmac, my first newspaper boss — on a tour of the NBC football studios. He was kind and generous with his time, and there is one thing I remember clearly about our time together.

I had just finished reading (for the first time, certainly not the last) “The City Game,” Axthelm’s timeless hymnal to basketball and New York City, a book that not only chronicled the ’70 Knicks but also introduced us to a remarkable roster of schoolyard legends. “The City Game” is where most of us were first introduced to the exploits of Earl “The Goat” Manigault.

I asked him about the book. The Knicks were experiencing one of their periodic mini-Renaissances, and the following spring would take the Celtics all the way to Game 7 of the Eastern semis, and it so happened they were built around a kid from Brooklyn named Bernard King. Axthelm patiently and politely listened to my fawning. And then he smiled.

“Kid,” he said, “the city game is dead.”

And that was thirty-three years ago.

Now, in fairness, this was before the Partnership of the Pats, Ewing and Riley, and the decade-long trip the Knicks would take the city on starting in 1992. It is truth, practically law, that in those days, baseball season didn’t officially begin in New York City until the day after the Knicks were eliminated from the playoffs. There was a seminal night in 1996: the Knicks losing to the 72-win Bulls in a deciding Game 5 in Chicago, while at the same time Dwight Gooden was no-hitting the Mariners in The Bronx.

But, truthfully, even after the Yankees started winning titles, four of them in five years starting that autumn, they would cede April and May — and sometimes June — to the Knicks. I’ve told that story a lot, and did so again the other day to someone, and every time I do I preface it with, “You know, it wasn’t that long ago when …”

Until it hit me the other day, as I said the words:

No, it really was a long time. A LONG time.

Sixteen years, to be precise, even if you include the outlier year of 2013, when the Knicks won 54 games and probably should have made it to the conference finals if not for J.R. Smith opting to go all Public Knucklehead one silly night in Boston. Sixteen years. Sixteen years. Reggie Miller closed the coffin on the 2000 Knicks, and that was a traumatic night in the Garden, one of many Reggie inflicted on the Knicks on those days.

And that, essentially, has been that.

It’s funny: One of the reasons Axthelm was so down on New York basketball in 1983 was because people had stopped coming to the Garden. In 1982-83, even with Bernard in the fold, even with a playoff team, the Knicks had averaged 10,703 fans per night to the 19,763-seat Garden. It was a depressing place to be most nights.

That hasn’t been the case lately, of course. The Knicks’ average attendance through 40 games is 19,812. That also happens to be the capacity of the newly configured Garden. It is as astonishing a figure as there is in all of sports, the capacity for success-starved Knicks fans to keep coming back, time after time, only to get smacked in the chin, time after time. They will fill the place today, too, and then go home for summer. Business may be good.

But the city game? It’s dead, kid.

JR Cummings: It was a disgrace that Dodgers pitcher Ross Stripling was taken out after 7 ¹/₃ no-hit innings Friday. The pitch count is a joke. Every starting pitcher should be able to throw 120 pitches from the beginning of the season. Pro sports has become a business, not like the old days when you played “for the love of the game.”

Vac: I was upset, too, because how often do you get a chance to see history? But I also saw what happened to Johan Santana after his no-hitter. Impossible to know if there was a connection there. But impossible not to wonder, too.

Tim Foster: As weak as David Wright’s throws have been, maybe he should try flipping the ball to Asdrubal Cabrera at short and letting him throw for him, like Rusty Staub had to do with Willie Mays in ’73 when his shoulder was bad but we needed his bat in the lineup.

Vac: One very clear element of the season so far: Mets fans still admire their captain. But many no longer have a bottomless supply of patience when it comes to him, either.

@AnigronewAdam: You hate to see injuries happen to any team or player, but it’s even worse happening so early in the season.

@MikeVacc: Forget your rooting interests. The game is diminished when young stars like Kyle Schwarber and A.J. Pollock go down. An awful first week.

Marc Aronin: Is there a team or an ownership group in all of sports other than what we’ve got in Queens that could manage to throw cold water over so much good, as in what they’ve done with this Mike Piazza jersey mess, other than the Mets?

Vac: Hmm, let me think about this for a min– NO!

Maybe instead of lecturing the world on how it should feel about the pending investigation haunting his team, Roy Williams (above) would have been better served coaching his team a little bit. Jay Wright utterly schooled him all night Monday, never more so than on the final possession.

Name the actor who has been on the kind of run Damian Lewis has been on the past 15 years — from Dick Winters (“Band of Brothers”) to Charlie Crews (“Life,” an NBC show you probably didn’t watch but should have) to Nicholas Brody (“Homeland”) to Bobby Axelrod (“Billions”).

Because I’m a pie-eyed optimist, I’m just going to say the Yankees’ rotation has a whole bunch of guys who prefer warmer weather.

Here’s hoping more players follow the example of D’Brickashaw Ferguson — who came, played almost every down, pulled down more than $70 million and was able to escape the NFL with his senses and his body intact.