Everyone around him was thinking the same thing, to the syllable. But it took Michael Strahan to roll his eyes, shake his shoulders, and have a gander at the assembled folks lugging notebooks and cameras and klieg lights to actually say it.

“It’s like I never left,” he said, laughing, on the afternoon 16 years back when he decided to end his holdout, a week shy of the Giants’ season opener.

“Maybe it was just a dream,” someone asked Strahan, who smiled.

“Y’all had the same dream, did you?” he said.

We all know how that piece of dramedy worked out, of course, almost five months to the day later, Strahan was sitting before another assemblage of notebooks and cameras and klieg lights, only this time he was in uniform, and this time there were more than a few pieces of blue and white confetti attached to him, the annual symbol of a freshly crowned Super Bowl champion.

Someone — perhaps it was your humble narrator — asked Strahan, “Did you ever think when you were working out in California during your holdout that it could work out like this?”

To which Strahan smiled broadly.

“Holdout?” he asked. “What holdout?”

Yes, holdouts have been a part of football — and a part of New York’s football teams — for as long as someone has been willing to cut paychecks for the privilege. They abound in football now, as markets and teams and players try to figure out something resembling fair compensation for a dandy and dangerous line of work.

And as we count down the final days to the Giants opening training camp, it looks more and more likely that Saquon Barkley is going to join the sizeable list of local players who have been holdouts through the years — some with astonishing results, some less so. But every time it happens it’s an intriguing game of chess between player and team that almost never ends with anyone being terribly satisfied.

The first high-profile New York football holdout wasn’t a traditional holdout at all. At a tearful press conference on June 6, 1969 — three days shy of five months after his crowning moment in Super Bowl III — Joe Namath announced that he was retiring from football rather than sell his interests in Bachelors III, a bar that, according to commissioner Pete Roselle, was lousy with “unsavory” figures.

Namath’s retirement lasted a little over a month and he dutifully did as he was told, selling his share of the bar. Even now, if you ask him about that — as I did a few years back — he shakes his head and says, “I did what I had to do, but I wasn’t wrong.”

That’s usually the mantra with these things, and it will surely be what both Barkley and Giants’ brass will say if and when this standoff ends. These things tend not to make anyone happy: the bosses want to pay what they want to pay; the athlete invariably thinks he’s getting played; the fans wonder if things will get resolved in an orderly and productive fashion.

Giants fans went through this twice with Lawrence Taylor. In 1983, coming off a year in which he’d been AP’s Defensive Player of the Year, Taylor held out for the first three weeks of training camp, and returned to add the third of his nine straight All-Pro selections. Seven years later he sat out the first 45 days of training camp before agreeing to a $1.6 million deal that, in the moment, made him the highest-paid defensive player in NFL history.

“Nobody ever gets everything they want,” Taylor said the day he returned, a few days shy of the Giants’ season opener in Philadelphia. “But I think we can all be happy.”

They certainly were all happy 4 ½ months later when the Giants won their second Super Bowl, Taylor seeding the exact same ground and the exact same path Strahan would sprint across 17 years later. It can go that way.

But it can also go the way Darrelle Revis’ holdout with the Jets went in 2010, which lasted seven bitter months and didn’t end until the final week of camp. The Jets went 11-5 that year and repeated as AFC finalists, but Revis tweaked a hamstring and missed three games and though he had another All-Pro season, it marked a genuine turning point in the relationship between the team and the player who’ll enter Canton in two weeks.

“I wish this could have gone differently,” Revis said that season.

The saga between Barkley and the Giants will end at some point, they always do. It’s what happens after the rift is closed that’ll be most fascinating to see. Best case, in six or seven months, it’ll all seem like a dream.