They’ll open the doors at Madison Square Garden around noon on Sunday, but this is one of those days when they could probably let them fly around 6 or 7 in the morning and there’d be a couple of thousand Knicks fans ready to take their seats, soak in the building, soak in the day, get an early start on the sore throats they’ll wake up with on Monday.

Knicks-Heat, 1 o’clock, in the Garden.

Yeah. Knicks fans are ready for this. New York City is ready for this. We can use logic and reason and talk ourselves into the quaint reality that there are no connections left between these Knicks and these Heat and the ones that used to engage in ferocious skirmishes of the soul every postseason from 1997-2000.

We can cue up all the old YouTube videos that tell the tale of that remarkable feud, the P.J. Brown-Charlie Ward fight that knocked the 1997 series upside down, the image of Jeff Van Gundy holding on to Alonzo Mourning’s leg like a feisty Rottweiler while Zo and Larry Johnson fought in 1998, the Allan Houston floater that ignited the Knicks on an epic run in 1999, the Clarence Weatherspoon do-or-die 16-footer at the buzzer in 2000 that died at the rim and slew the Heat with it.

All of that is wonderful. All of that is fine. And all of that pales in comparison to the biggest part of all of this:
Knicks-Heat, 1 o’clock, in the Garden.

“I think probably the players, they’re too young, some probably weren’t even born,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said, as he revved up his team to be ready for the start of the best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinals. “But the older people who’ve been around, that’s part of the history and it’s fun. You love competition. That’s what it’s all about.”

Thibodeau was on the bench in those days, assisting Jeff Van Gundy. His fondest memories? “Just how fierce it was,” he said. “The great respect for them. The way they competed. You go back now, occasionally you see the game be replayed. And the physicality, but it was just great, hard competition. And it was on every play. the style of play is a little bit different today than it was then.”

Knicks-Heat, 1 o’clock in the Garden.

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In some ways, this is even more of a scintillating prospect for the Knicks, who have never had home-court advantage in the five times they’ve faced the Heat in the playoffs (including a one-sided beatdown in 2012 in which the most memorable moment was Amar’e Stoudemire punching a fire extinguisher after a loss in Miami). The Knicks are the betting favorites to win this series. And they won three out of the four times these teams played this year.

But the Heat bring with them the exact-perfect weapon that has always been most devastating to the Knicks at this time of the calendar: a star, playing like a star, who would like nothing more than to beam that star power all over the fifth floor of Penn Plaza.

His name is Jimmy Butler, and if you watched Games 4 and 5 of the Heat’s still-hard-to-fathom takedown of the top-seeded Bucks, you saw a player residing on a level so rarefied and so elite that it was almost impossible to believe what you were watching.

Butler dropped 56 points in Game 4. He added 42 more in Game 5, including the layup-while-he-was-falling-on-his-arse at the regulation buzzer that tied the score and all that ripped the Bucks’ hearts out of their chests, while he sat on the floor gobbling fava beans and guzzling Chianti.

“It’s not just the shot making,” said Thibodeau, who coached Butler in Chicago and Minneapolis. “It is the ability to get into the paint, make plays, get to the line. You have to be disciplined against him, but also the shot creation. So your team has to be locked into the things that he’s doing.”

Butler has the opportunity to join a rogues’ gallery of stars who’ve broken Knicks hearts through the years, players who proved equal to the moment and to the pressure and to the fact everyone in the building was desperate to see them fail and instead they soared. You know their names, most of them requiring only one name: Michael. Reggie. Trae. Go back a few years, there’s Larry Bird. Go back a few more there’s Gus Johnson and Earl the Pearl, before he switched sides.

Will we be talking about Jimmy in two weeks? Will we be recounting six or seven epic battles of will and force? Will we be talking about a Knicks team still in play, still on the rise? Will the Garden get in the Heat’s heads the way it crept into the Cavaliers’?

Knicks-Heat.

One o’clock.

In the Garden.

Hell, yeah.