Knicks fans, the long nightmare is almost over. This wasn’t the worst season in team history — the Eddie Donovan-coached teams of the early 1960s will keep that distinction. But this had to be one of the most exasperating seasons in local sports history. From Isiah Thomas’s sexual harassment lawsuit, to the drama of Stephon Marbury, to the 45-point shellacking in Boston — by Christmas, the Knicks had a season to forget, and it didn’t get much better after that.

Knicks fans in their mid-30s or older might recall another dark era for the team, the mid-1980s. A look back at those squads may be instructive about what lies ahead for this year’s disaster of a team. From 1985–87, the Knicks lost 175 games. But their roster contained stellar players and future Hall of Famers. Their coach, Hubie Brown, is in the Hall of Fame. And the team was coming off of some impressive playoff runs. How could things have gone wrong so quickly?

The Knicks entered the 1984–85 season on a wave of optimism. In the spring of ’84, the team fought the Boston Celtics in a grueling seven-game conference semifinal series that featured great performances by Bernard King and Larry Bird. Although the Celtics won the series and went on to win the NBA title, it was widely believed that the Knicks were on the verge of replacing the aging Philadelphia 76ers in the Eastern Conference elite.

Then injuries hit. Center Bill Cartwright and power forward Len “Truck” Robinson were lost for the season. Those Knicks were forced to rely on journeymen such as Ken Bannister and Pat Cummings in the pivot; 6-foot-8-inch, 175-pound Louis Orr often started at power forward. The team was overpowered inside and fell from 47–35 to 24–58. The lone highlight of the team was King, who often turned the offense into a one-man show. He scored 60 in a Christmas Day game against New Jersey. He scored 50 in consecutive games. Then in March, he went down with a serious knee injury. The sting of the season was wiped entirely clean when in the very first NBA lottery, the Knicks came up a winner, gaining the rights to draft center Patrick Ewing.

With Ewing in the lineup, it seemed like the 1985 season would be a fluke. In fact, while Ewing deservedly got the bulk of the attention, the Knicks also scored in the second round of the draft, nabbing small forward Gerald Wilkins. The youth movement proved necessary, but it was too little to stop the effect of injuries. Cartwright aggravated his injury and missed all but two games, and what’s worse, King remained sidelined for the first of nearly two consecutive seasons he would miss.

But these Knicks weren’t as hopeless as those in the preceding season. With Ewing patrolling the paint, the Knicks became a stellar defensive squad, finishing fifth in Defensive Efficiency (points allowed per 100 possessions). They finished 23–59, but the immediate future seemed bright.

It wasn’t. In 1986–87, the Knicks had both pivotmen healthy, but struggled to find a way to have both Ewing and Cartwright on the floor at the same time. Neither was a natural power forward and playing the two simultaneously had the same egregious impact on the team that playing Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph together had on this year’s unit. Brown was finally let go early in the season after two horrible years, and his replacement, Bob Hill, proved to be little more than a caretaker on the bench. The once stout defense declined markedly and the only hope was in a late season return by King, who looked old and creaky compared to his pre-injury self.

In each of their three miserable mid-1980s seasons, the Knicks entered the campaign brimming with optimism and with a stellar cast of players and coaching. Each season, though, they made a 180-degree turn. There wasn’t off-court drama to embarrass the fans as there was this season, and the team didn’t lose to a close rival by almost 50 points. But these are years that most Knicks fans would — save for King’s heroics and Ewing’s early days — like to forget.

The Knicks returned to the playoffs the following year. They hired Rick Pitino as coach and drafted point guard Mark Jackson. Pitino stopped the silly practice of trying to force Cartwright and Ewing to share the paint and made Ewing the starter. With Jackson shutting down opposing point guards, the team’s defense returned to a high level and led the team to a 38–44 record.

So, the Knicks enter an off-season that will likely bring a new coach and a new point guard to the Garden. For history to repeat itself, one of the Knicks’ interior players will need to start channeling Ewing, which is not likely to happen. However, two out of three will surely break the malaise in Knicks Knation, and at least have the team pointed in the right direction for a change.

mjohnson@nysun.com