THE end came in a harsh spasm of silence, a groaning buzzer chasing the remnants of the crowd out to the rainy streets surrounding Madison Square Garden.

Maybe they had an inkling of what they were about to see when they had come and filled all 19,763 seats a few hours earlier, a nostalgic sell-out echoing past glories.

But they left understanding the simplest of realities about these Knicks.

Latrell Sprewell might make them watchable again, but nothing will make them bearable.

Not for a good, long time, anyway. Because in so many ways, what the Knicks were yesterday, all across a gut-splaying 93-92 loss to the 76ers, was everything they’ve been during this miserable 1-8 start. They were sloppy. They were poorly coached. They spent too many minutes looking like a pick-up team thrown together before the opening tap.

They just had a very special guest star this time around to serve as a diversionary tactic from the relentlessly awful basketball.

“There have already been too many games like this,” Sprewell said, slumped in front of his locker, after coming off the bench to provide 16 points, two steals and a feels-like-I’ve-never-been-gone energy boost. “We play well in stretches, we play hard in stretches, but when we need to execute something goes wrong.”

Yes, for these Knicks, something always seems to go wrong, terribly wrong. And so even on the day when Knicks fans expected to see a reasonable facsimile of the team they thought they’d have this season, what they received instead was a cold-water reminder of the way things are.

Even with Sprewell back in the fold.

Have a nice day. Please arrive home safely.

“It’s frustrating, because that was a game we should have won, like a lot of the games we’ve played this year,” Kurt Thomas said. “That game was there for us to win and we couldn’t get it done, and that isn’t an easy thing to accept.”

It is easier to explain, however. Adding Sprewell to this lineup adds a dollop of star quality, but the Knicks are so far gone already, that it’s like trying to add Brando to the cast of a floundering summer stock play. Talent and energy and passion can only translate so much when the established supporting cast has sunk to such dreadful depths.

Sprewell may bring a few extra bodies back to the Garden, but his overall impact, at best, can only approximate that of Keith Bishop – the fan from Hudson Falls, N.Y. who banked in a million-dollar halfcourt shot during a second-quarter timeout and filled the Garden with a dash of old-school thunder it hasn’t heard in years.

“[Sprewell] played to expectations,” Knicks coach Don Chaney said.

The problem is, so did everyone else. Thomas, whose tiresome act has grown so stale and predictable by now, nullified what should have been Sprewell’s signature moment by mindlessly body-checking Sixer Brian Skinner as both trailed a Sprewell steal and dunk. Then, to make sure nobody would forget what a hot-headed dope he can be, Thomas picked up a technical foul to complement that.

The Knicks could have used all three of those points at the end of the game.

They also could have used much better fourth-quarter poise and judgment, a standard song throughout November. They didn’t add to their string of blown double-digit leads only because the best they could do was build a nine-point cushion, 79-70, before using the game’s final eight minutes and four seconds to hand it all back, with interest.

And they surely could have gotten something better than the hurried 3-point heave Howard Eisley pumped up – out of a timeouts, no less, in which a play was drawn up for Allan Houston – which served as the Knicks’ final stand of another lost afternoon.

Into this irretrievable mess stepped Sprewell, who may now understand why a trade may not only be a panacea for the Knicks, but the greatest gift they could give him.

“I think I brought energy, and a spark, and a competitive spirit to the game today,” he said. “It’s just very disappointing to have it end the way it ended. It’s very frustrating.”

He wasn’t alone. As the final four-tenths of a second sped away, following a meaningless Houston three-pointer, all the life and all the energy that Sprewell brought to this team and this arena was gone, vaporized by one more fourth-quarter collapse, one more narrow loss. The people hurried to the street, not even bothering to boo on their way out.

The silence they left behind may have been the loudest statement of all.