THE strange, endless, uncomfortable honeymoon ends now. Larry Brown has to understand that.

If he is indeed committed to remaining the Knicks coach, if his health is indeed the non-issue he insists it is and if

his bosses really want him back, as they maintain they do, then the nonsense has to stop, and he has to start concentrating on the reason why the Knicks were willing to pay him $10 million a year.

He needs to coach basketball. Period. He needs to lose the mind games, the mind tricks, the diva performance that added spice and surrealism to the 23-59 basketball calamity that infected Madison Square Garden this winter. Knicks fans don’t care who is technically in the right when he has a flare-up with one of his players, they care only what the record is.

Mostly, he needs to understand, finally, at age 65 (going on 66) that the business he has chosen is coaching professional basketball, and professional ballplayers, and professional egos. For years Brown has ruminated about how nice it would be to coach high school ball somewhere, where he could be a teacher, where he could mold young basketball hearts and sculpt young basketball souls.

You know what? He’s more than welcome to do that tomorrow, if he’d like, if he doesn’t mind forfeiting the remaining $40 million the Knicks owe him, if he doesn’t mind teaching and molding for a $7,000 stipend somewhere, in between teaching health and phys ed. If he wants to find that basketball paradise of his tortured dreams, if he wants to be Gene Hackman in “Hoosiers,” then do it.

If not, if he wants to be the head coach of the New York Knicks, then he should quit the ancillary agendas and coach the damn team. No more handwringing. No more feuds with the star, whomever that star happens to be.

“I’m better for this experience,” Larry Brown said yesterday.

It’s impossible to think that he truly believes that, because nothing about Larry Brown is better today than it was on July 27, not his health, not his winning percentage, not his perception as a basketball impresario, certainly not his reputation.

The biggest problem in assessing this Knicks’ catastrophe is the lack of one easy scapegoat on whom to hang the misery, no solitary Layden-esque figure of abject ridicule to beat like a pinata. Rather, there are three of them, all of whom deserved the scorn that trickled from the truest Garden faithful.

Isiah Thomas assembled this mess, he dug what sure looks to be an impassable black hole, and he deserves every dart aimed his way. Stephon Marbury was the self-styled on-floor leader, and he did nothing to reverse his career-long perception as a scowling, snarling me-first point guard whose delusions of grandeur have helped sandbag what should have been one of the best New York basketball stories ever written.

And Larry Brown directed it all, with a detachment that was difficult to fathom, an unwillingness to adapt that was staggering to watch, what seemed like a saboteurs’ agenda on so many lost basketball nights. Brown was spared the wrath of the fans, for the most part, if only because after ripping Thomas and Marbury so relentlessly they had precious little anger left to spill.

You can be certain that ends now. If Brown wants to remain on the payroll, then he is officially on the clock, starting now.

“I want to retire here, fulfill my contract and stay involved as long as they’ll have me,” Brown said yesterday.

His has been a career stuffed with similar statements that turned out later to be halftruths at best, full-blown deceit at worst, and so you never really know about Brown’s intentions until you see him report for work on the first day of training camp.

But if he happens to be telling the truth this time, he’d better be ready to back it up. He’d better be willing to be what he always seemed to be on the visiting bench at the Garden: the smartest guy in the room, the best coach on the floor, no matter who was sitting on the other side. That’s what the Knicks thought they were paying for. It’s time for Brown to start proving they were right.