Wait till next year, they used to say in Brooklyn. Wait till the Dodgers finally beat those damn Yankees in the World Series.

It happened, of course, in 1955, a couple years before the Dodgers broke the borough’s heart and left for Hollywood. Decades later, an unloved NBA franchise leaving New Jersey for Brooklyn was never going to fill that void.

But a professional sports championship is a powerful thing. And beating the New York Knicks to the first NBA title for a metropolitan area team since 1973 would have meant something profound for a borough that, by population, ranks as the fourth largest city in America.

So when they signed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in the summer of 2019, the Nets were prepared to land a devastating right hook to a local franchise that had it coming. The Knicks had lost 284 games over the previous five years, an average of nearly 57 a pop, and their starting five in their 65th and final defeat of the 2018-19 season — a blowout loss to the .500 Pistons at the Garden — read like this:

Damyean Dotson. Luke Kornet. Kevin Knox. Mario Hezonja. Mitchell Robinson.

The completely overmatched coach was David Fizdale, the completely overmatched team president was Steve Mills, and the completely overmatched team owner was James Dolan.

The Nets had a wide-open lane to their goal. They’d landed the biggest available stars and, after the Knicks were forced to settle for Julius Randle as a consolation prize, Mills was effectively forced to apologize to the fan base.

The battle for New York’s basketball soul was a mismatch even before the Nets dealt for James Harden and fielded perhaps the most devastating one-two-three punch in league history. Brooklyn was the desired destination for the elites, not Manhattan, and the Nets were all set to end the city’s title drought sooner rather than later. Nobody was terribly surprised that they ultimately ripped off nine straight victories over the Knicks.

And yet when they showed up at the Garden on Wednesday night, winners of a grand total of one playoff series in the expired Durant/Irving era, the Nets were a relatively anonymous and formless lot. In fact, even Dolan’s facial recognition technology would’ve failed to identify them.

These Nets surrendered 47 points in the first quarter and 81 points by the half in what would be a 142-118 defeat. They also surrendered any hope that they might stop the city’s more traditional tenant from controlling the hoops market in the coming years.

The Knicks are going to avoid the play-in tournament and make the playoffs this season, and probably every season that Jalen Brunson is their quarterback. Brunson has had that kind of impact on his new team. If he stays healthy, he will do more for the Knicks over the long haul than Durant and Irving ever did for the Nets.

As a much better player than advertised, a $104 million steal in free agency, Brunson scored 30 of his 39 points against Brooklyn in that absurd first half. He won’t have Derek Jeter’s career in New York, but it isn’t hard to picture him having a Jeter-like impact on the Knicks and on his head coach, Tom Thibodeau, who needed a special player in the middle of his third program the way Joe Torre needed one in the middle of his fourth.

A two-time national champion at Villanova, Brunson is far more concerned about winning than he is about spending halftime at the Garden trying to figure out how he can hang 50 or 60 on the Nets. A point guard committed to big-picture thinking will be appealing to veteran stars looking for a new home — via trade or free agency — in a place that is crazy about the sport.

Brooklyn could have been that place. Once upon a time, the Nets made a disastrous deal with Boston for the aging Kevin Garnett, the aging Paul Pierce, and a one-and-done shot at a title. It took them a while to recover and get in position to do the Durant and Irving (and Harden) deals and take a crack at the kind of long-term contention the Knicks could only dream of.

Now, after the Big 3 was reduced to the Big Flee, the Nets have one marquee name under contract to show for their efforts, Ben Simmons, who is the opposite of Jalen Brunson.

The opposite of a nine-figure bargain.

Overstocked with good-but-not-great perimeter players, the Nets have lost four straight and are sinking toward the deep end of the play-in pool. Meanwhile, the Knicks have won seven straight and seem a good bet to hurdle the Cavaliers and to host a first-round playoff series.

But this isn’t only about the 2022-23 season. The Nets didn’t just lose ground to the Knicks in the Eastern Conference race.

They lost a chance to prove that stars could thrive in their organization and elevate Barclays Center above the Garden as New York’s preferred basketball stage. The Nets had the Knicks down and bloodied and let them back up.

Who knows if they will ever really recover from that?