WE WERE cheated. You can’t often say that about baseball fans in New York City. No matter your stripe, no matter your league preference, no matter your favorite team or favored memory, we have been blessed with an abundance of baseball splendor through the years.

Our great-great grandfathers were treated to Muggsy McGraw’s old New York Giants, a team that owned New York City in a way that even the Yankees have never approached. Our great-grandfathers got to see Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Mel Ott and Bill Terry, and our grandfathers had even more choices, because that’s when the Dodgers became the Boys of Summer and so they got to choose Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges and Duke Snider if they weren’t already partial to Joe DiMaggio and Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle.

Our fathers? They had the ’69 Mets, or the Bronx Zoo Yankees.

We had the ’86 Mets and the Joe Torre Yankees. Our kids will get to watch Alex Rodriguez hit his 800th home run, maybe see Mike Pelfrey win close to 200 games if everything falls right.

It’s hard to complain, it really is.

Except for one thing:

They took Willie Mays away from us just as he was proving to the world that he was the greatest baseball player who’d ever been born, and they didn’t send him back to us until he’d turned into a cartoon, a sad, stumbling shadow of who he used to be.

Mays turned 75 years old yesterday, and that is a milestone baseball happily celebrates at a time when its milestones are increasingly under fire. But the Mays everyone celebrates spent most of his prime years 3,000 miles away. He was stolen away from us, same as someone lifting your wallet.

“The greatest baseball tragedy I know,” says Sid Francis, “is that there’s an entire segment of people who grew up in New York, the greatest baseball town of them all, whose first point of reference to Willie Mays as a New Yorker was of him falling down in the outfield. How awful is that?

But I saw Willie Mays play when he was a kid. That’s what people should remember, not the old man who was a Met.” Francis grew up in The Bronx but couldn’t stomach rooting for the Yankees, and the Dodgers played in Brooklyn, which to a kid on Arthur Avenue might as well have been in Wyoming. So he rooted for the Giants. In the summer of 1951, he was just starting school at Columbia. In the fall of 1954, he was still there. He figures he saw 60 games at the Polo Grounds in those last two years of New York Giants prominence.

“Willie was so good that when he did do something spectacular, you didn’t really even understand how spectacular was. I hear people talk about Alex Rodriguez, that maybe he’ll be the best who ever lived before he’s through. People who say that, they never saw Willie Mays play.” The compound travesty is that when Mays did wind up in San Francisco, his new hometown never took to him the way it should have.

San Franciscans wanted their own heroes, their own stars, their own idols and so Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda were more popular than Mays.

They knew Willie should have belonged to us even if the Willie we saw, we got for only four full seasons. He started 1951 in Minneapolis, finished 1952 in the army and stayed there for all of ’53. Those first two full years, 1954 and ’55, Mays hit 92 home runs, drove in 237 runs, scored 242 runs, and chased down every fly ball hit within what became the 212 area code.

“He would take your breath away,” Joe Torre says, “by doing things that came as naturally to him as breathing.” In 1957, his last year in New York, Mays was 26 years old and he hit .333 with 35 homers and 97 RBIs, and there was no telling what miracles he would assemble over the next decade and a half. There was only one problem.

“People stopped going to see him,” Francis says. “They stopped going to the Polo Grounds. As an adult, it makes perfect sense why Horace Stoneham did what he did. But as a kid, it was like someone had amputated my soul.” The Giants won the World Series in 1954, and drew 1.15 million fans to the Polo Grounds. Just two years later, they barely drew 600,000. The ballpark was crumbling, and so was the neighborhood. Baseball fans lived in the outer boroughs and in the suburbs. They wouldn’t come to Harlem, not even to see Willie Mays. Soon enough, they wouldn’t see him at all for four long years, and then later on for only 10 or 12 times a year when the Mets were born.

The Mets brought him back in 1972. It was a nice gesture. He hit a home run in his first game as a Met, against the Giants, of course. But he was 41. He played another year, at 42, and he stood in front of a microphone late that year and said “Willie, say good-bye to America,” and then a few weeks after that he was sprawled on the grass at the Oakland Coliseum, a most inglorious final act to what had been such a spectacularly public American life.

Strike that image, if you can. Take the Mets uniform off Willie Mays in your mind. Put a Giants uniform on him instead.

You won’t get the full sense of what he was.

But it’s a start.

(Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. His YankeesRed Sox book, “Emperors and Idiots,” will be released in paperback Tuesday).

VAC’S WHACKS

Yes, it’s early. Yes, the Phillies are starting to heat up. And yes, there isn’t a soul who will believe the Braves will forfeit their stranglehold on the NL East pennant until it’s pried from their cold, dead fingers. Still, when the Mets win a game like they did Friday night, it’s hard not think there really might be something special brewing alongside Flushing Bay.

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It’s only a vicious rumor that the “DWI” that cop wrote on the ticket he issued Sandis Ozolinsh (above) last week stood for “Defending With Incompetence.”

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There has to be a local statute under which Larry Brown can press charges against Isiah Thomas if he winds up saddled with Kenyon Martin next year, right?

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I’ll say this very nicely to Mr.

Dick Wolf: let’s patch things up between Detectives Stabler and Benson on “Law & Order: SVU,” and let’s make it snappy.