Admit it:

These last nine days have been torturous for you. They’ve felt like nine weeks. Maybe you’ve found other diversions to satisfy your basketball jones (hello, Fordham!). Maybe you’ve simply decided that, as with Jalen Brunson, taking a breather wasn’t just a bad idea.

The Knicks sprinted to the three-quarters pole and then — voila! — the games just disappeared. They’d won three in a row and five out of six, they’d nudged their way six games over .500, they’d eked past the Heat into sixth place in the East, within shouting range of the Nets in fifth …

And then, nothing.

Nine days worth of nothing.

Tom Thibodeau took the All-Star break to take “a snapshot of where we are and where we have to go, to lock into what has to be done each and every day.” Julius Randle spent the weekend in Salt Lake City, enjoying himself far more than his first All-Star Game appearance two years ago. Josh Hart went to Cabo, to celebrate his brother’s engagement.

You?

Well, look: if you are a Knicks fan of a certain age, you found yourself in an odd predicament. For the better part of 23 years, nine days without basketball in the middle of the season was referred to differently. “An act of mercy” was a good one. “A pause in the middle of the misery” worked, too.

But now? You could make an argument that the level at which the Knicks were playing heading into the break was as high as at any time since the 2012-13 team that won 54 games and won the franchise’s only playoff series going back to 2000. Even the 41-31 delight of a team from two years ago hadn’t looked this sharp, this focused, this impressive.

“We were in a groove,” Hart, the new guy, said Thursday. “It was a little bit of a bummer.”

The Mexican sun probably lessened the disappointment for Hart.

For you, faithful Knicks fan?

Beginning Friday the Knicks officially begin the 22-game bell lap to their season. They jump back in with two feet, Friday in D.C. against the red-hot Wizards (10-4 in their last 14 games, only three back of the Knicks in the loss column) then Saturday against the Pelicans, just 7-16 since Zion Williamson’s latest injury but a prime-time Saturday-night special at the Garden, where the Knicks have been less than bulletproof this season.

It is an appropriate beginning to the final quarter of the season. The Knicks are facing the eighth-toughest schedule the rest of the way, with two games against the Celtics in the next nine days as well as a four-game-in-six days tour through Sacramento, L.A. and Portland that could well define what the Knicks are going to be this year.

And what is that, exactly?

“There’s another level we can get to,” Randle said. “We need to keep building on our consistent play.”

Said Hart: “I’m not going to say, ‘We’re going to be the 2 seed,’ or anything like that but we’re a team that can make a run, a team that other teams won’t want to play.”

“I always think,” Thibodeau said, “that we can get better.”

Thibodeau was preaching that even early, with the Knicks lurking below .500 and looking overmatched most nights, so he of course is going to follow the same secular scripture now, with the proof in the Knicks’ recent play, with the legit possibility of landing in the main playoff draw.

“If we take care of all the little things,” he said, “the big things will take care of themselves.”

These next two games will be especially fascinating as benchmarks. The Wizards thumped the Knicks 37 days ago, as complete a beating as the Knicks have absorbed this year. That’s Friday. Saturday is the Garden, which is supposed to be one of the great home-court edges anywhere, but the Knicks are all of 16-15 there.

“We know we’re getting everyone’s best shot there,” Hart said.

Maybe none of those things matter since Hart wasn’t there for much of this, since Mitchell Robinson is due back soon, and maybe this weekend, since the Knicks looked a whole lot different before the All-Star break got in the way. We’ll find out soon enough. The dash home begins Friday night, a 22-game gallop that might be the most anticipated 22-game stretch in …

Well, just say a long, long time. The break is over. The sabbatical is done. Here comes the basketball season, and here come the Knicks. Yeah.