It’s impossible to run from the what-if portion of this dreadful development, so it’s best to say it up high.

There was a crystallised moment of this basketball season when if you were a Knicks fan, you were allowed the greatest gift of all: belief. Actual, genuine, legitimate belief, not coloured by rose-coloured spectacles or fanciful dreams.

We can identify the precise moment, too.

It was with 4 minutes and 28 seconds remaining of a game on Jan. 27 in which the Knicks led the Heat, 115-98.

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Madison Square Garden had spent the previous two hours in a state of unfiltered delirium. The Knicks were splattering the defending Eastern Conference champions just two days after battering the defending champion Nuggets by 30.

The Knicks were as hot as they’d ever been in the new millennium, and were playing their best ball in decades, in the midst of a month in which they would go 14-2.

One second later, Julius Randle drove to the basket. He was fouled by Jaime Jaquez Jr. He fell, hard, on his right shoulder. The Garden’s roar was reduced to a whisper.

It was as if all 19,812 people knew, in their hearts, that something had changed.

That, maybe, something is over.

The Knicks’ season didn’t end at 10:45 Thursday morning [US time] when ESPN reported that Randle’s season was officially over, that after two-plus months of rest and rehab Randle had decided at last to get his shoulder surgically repaired.

Not technically, anyway.

The Knicks are still in play to stay out of the play-in game. And they have shown a season-long resilience, often answering strongest when the looming clouds appear darkest.

But without their second-best offensive player, it’s impossible to conjure a scenario where the Knicks can harbour any kind of significant playoff run. They can play with the Cavaliers, Magic and Pacers on sheer heart and grit; they’ll need more than that against the Celtics, Bucks, Heat and even an Embiid-embedded Sixers.

So suddenly “what-if” becomes “what-now?”

The Knicks, in truth, had already begun to make that transition. Not publicly, no: they maintained the illusion — or delusion — of a Randle return as long as possible, and it’s likely that’s because Randle himself kept hoping against hope that he’d wake up one day and he’d feel ready to try real basketball contact. That’s Randle’s way. Say what you want about the flaws in his game but he’s a lunch-pail guy. He shows up for work. He cares, deeply.

But the shoulder is a tricky thing. And the way Randle plays, absent surgery, every time he made a move to the basket, he and everyone else who cares about the Knicks would be holding their breath.

So they waited until they couldn’t wait any longer to accept the inevitable.

But the Knicks, at least in code, had already begun to sprinkle breadcrumbs of hints as to what was afoot. On Sunday, Tom Thibodeau had cryptically said before a loss to the Thunder, “We just deal with reality day-to-day.”

And afterwards Josh Hart had been significantly less ambiguous:

“I’m not in those medical conversations or anything like that, so I don’t know s–t from s–t. We’ve got to approach it every game and the end of this season that those guys aren’t coming back, and if they do be pleasantly surprised.”

There will be no surprise from Randle, which means that whatever dreams Knicks fans had of going toe-to-toe with the Celtics or Bucks — and they sure seemed legit early in the evening of Jan. 27 — probably go into the O.R. with him.

Now they wait and hope to be surprised by OG Anunoby, hope he can make it back from a bout of tennis elbow in time to at least give them a puncher’s chance against everyone else, depending on how the 2 through 7 slots shake out in the East.

Maybe that wasn’t the ambition when Randle had the ball in his hands, 4 ½ minutes left on what may be the last night — what might’ve been the last second — the Knicks could fancy themselves as interrupters of an inevitable Boston coronation in the East. Life isn’t fair sometimes. And sports, sure as hell, fair even less.

This article first appeared on The New York Postand was reproduced with permission