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Remember Eddie Haskell from “Leave It To Beaver?”

One of the most enduring and endearing characters in TV history, Eddie, played by Ken Osmond, was so full of it he was the only one who didn’t know that everyone knew. That’s what made him insultingly, transparently funny.

Eddie would be at the Cleaver home to visit Wally, but then would abuse Wally’s kid brother, Beaver. “Hey squirt, the milkman came by looking for you. He said he was short a half-pint. Heh-heh.”

“Very funny, Eddie,” said Beaver.

“Aw, cut it out, Eddie,” said Wally.

Mrs. Cleaver would enter and Eddie would go to work: “Oh, good afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver. My, you look particularly lovely today. Mr. Cleaver, I dare say, is one lucky man.”

“Why, thank you, Eddie.”

Simple, repetitive stuff. And still funny.

That brings us to the Masters as seen on CBS and now ESPN, too. Four days of the Eddie Haskell treatment — stroke-by-stroke commentary, essays, music, the entire package — all ostensibly to please the Masters masters who, in another time, might have preferred King George to George Washington, Jeff Davis to Abe Lincoln.

OK, it’s their house, their tournament and, through a string of intentionally pressurized one-year TV contracts, their telecast. ESPN, yesterday, wouldn’t have dared thrown its “Bottom Line” crawl beneath the Masters, and that’s a very good thing.

But when the ceaseless, breathless Eddie Haskell treatment is insulting but not the least bit funny and only worthy of scorn, who wins? Not the Masters folks, not the TV folks and certainly not the viewers.

That’s why the TV side has to stop its solemn, straight-faced portrayals of Augusta National as, ugh, “sacred ground” and “hallowed earth” within “a sanctified setting.”

Aw, cut it out, Eddie.

The Masters is a special golf tournament played on a special golf course, but it’s still golf played on a golf course. It’s Augusta National, not Arlington National.

It’s a golf course. Fall in one of those hallowed creeks down there and you come up wet and muddy and stinky as if you fell in a creek at Skunk Hollow Public GC and Petting Zoo. If one of those sanctified chirping birds at Augusta poops on your cap it’s not worth a dime more; you might even want to throw it in one of those sacred Augusta National trash cans.

TV’s oversell of the Masters as a religious retreat or annual pilgrimage is both understood and, like an in-floating oil slick, makes for the kind of relentless goo that rubs nature and nerves the wrong way.

Through Jim Nantz, CBS for years has told us — over and over and over — that the Masters is “a tradition unlike any other.” Hmmm. We know, we know.

Local baseball-casters on real hitting streak

The best baseball broadcasts are heard when the broadcasters let the game come to them, no forced dialogue, no straining for issues, over-analysis or parroting any stat in the databank.

Mets starter Chris Young’s three hits, Tuesday, led Keith Hernandez, on SNY, to ask Gary Cohen whether a Mets pitcher has had four hits in a game. Not sure, Cohen said, but “I know pitchers have had four hits against the Mets.”

“That was me!” said Ron Darling. “Steve Avery!”

“That’s good,” said Hernandez, “That means you were pitching well to everyone else.”

“I don’t know,” said Darling. “The more we get into my career, the less I’m impressed by it.”

More good stuff yesterday: YES’ Michael Kay, at the start of Twins-Yankees, said Twins batters are 0-for-15 in the first inning, thus far. Minutes later, 0-for-18. Hard to do. (Ties a record, too!)

Kay later noted that even vet Jim Thome just jog-watched a blast off the wall, winding up rounding second instead of reaching third. Kay then called the disinclination of big-leaguers to run out deep fly balls “epidemic.” He’s right.

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Ralph Kiner, 88, who 50 years ago began broadcasting Mets games when the Mets began playing them, will throw out the first pitch of today’s home opener.

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The live, on-line transmission from the Masters, yesterday, again was so remarkably clear and well-defined that traffic on porn sites must’ve been way down.

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Concussions? Where? Who? MSG Network, Saturday, presented “The Countdown’s” Top 20 clips of modern Rangers in round-housing, head-punching, knock-down fights. Come and get it!

Lousy NCAA final? Not to this viewer!

NCAAtTournament, last licks:

1) As they say down at the honey farm, beauty lies in the eye of the bee-holder. The first half of the Butler-UConn final, widely condemned as half of the ugliest championship seen on TV since Big Joanie Weston skated the San Francisco Bay Bombers to the roller derby title, was nothing of the sort. It was the most intensive defensive half most have ever seen.

Look again: How many “easy” or open shots were taken or available? Two? Three? Every man with the ball inside or who made a move inside appeared to be immediately double-teamed, often from the blind side. Not one player in that first half drew a restful breath while on defense.

Funny, here, where the Knicks hear it for not playing defense, a big game that included smothering D was ridiculed as bad, ugly basketball.

2) The telecast had an odd start: Both teams, in their first possession — before CBS established which way it would shoot the game — were seen attacking left to right.

3) Self-enslaving, backward-pointing culture was displayed during UConn’s on-court postgame chat with Jim Nantz. Annoyed by a teammate while he listened to Nantz, Kemba Walker reflexively scolded him with the N-word.

4) Even by his usual standards, Mike Francesa, starting with the Big East tournament, got the postseason spectacularly wrong. For his final act, Monday, His Highness arrogantly dismissed a caller’s suggestion that UConn could win that night’s final by double digits.

UConn won by 12.

5) For CBS, at halftime, to throw it again to Charles Barkley and the other studio guys while Chris Mullin and Artis Gilmore, among others, stood at halfcourt as the 2011 inductees to the Basketball Hall of Fame, was one those modern TV crimes against a sport that we should’ve by now gotten used to. But can’t.

The other modern TV crime was that the game tipped at 9:26 p.m. The NCAA wanted to wait until all the campus libraries had closed.

6) Butler Bulldogs vs. the UConn Huskies. Reader Mark Morley writes that it should have been called “The Final Fur.”

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