CHARLESTON, S.C. — Maybe you are a wait-and-see Knicks fan. Maybe all the years and all the lousy basketball have taken their toll, so that even last year’s enjoyable renaissance at Madison Square Garden is something you spy with a jaundiced eye. It’s OK. It’s understandable. You don’t have to cannon ball into the deep end just yet.

But there is at least one Knicks fan who is ready to take that dive, and he goes all the way back to the Old Garden, when he’d take the train in from Long Beach with a G.O. card in his wallet and 50 cents in his pocket for a ticket.

“I’m a big fan of these Knicks,” says Larry Brown, who has seen a thing or three in a basketball life now in its eighth decade. “I love the players they have. I love Thibs. I love watching them play. And I’m excited to see what they can do this year. I really am.”

Brown is uniquely familiar with this team in a lot of ways, starting with a longtime admiration for Tom Thibodeau. A few years back, he was living in Philadelphia, and he would often drive over to the Villanova campus — “I was there more than Jay Wright was,” he laughs, “because there were some days he was off recruiting.”

One of the continuing narratives around this team is the quartet of former Wildcats — Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo, Ryan Arcidiacano — on the roster. But Brown sees that as more than a quirky oddity. He saw them back in the day, as kids, saw the seeds of what would become a two-time national championship core.

“The DNA of the Villanova guys is remarkable,” Brown says over the telephone, “and I think when you have four guys who’ve been through all of that with Coach Wright, it bodes very well for the Knicks.”

Brown recruited Brunson when he was coaching at SMU, and also recruited Julius Randle. Of Randle he says, “I know he’s gotten a hard time there once in a while, but he’s always been a quality kid and he’s a terrific player.”

The call to Brown was placed with a purpose. A fair question about these Knicks is this: Just how good can they be? How far can this team go if all the cards fall where they must — good health, sustained chemistry, perhaps a missing piece acquired at the trading deadline.

And it is Brown’s 2003-04 Pistons that come fastest to mind, probably the last superstar-free champion in the league, a team that had already learned to win but finished second (by seven games) in its own division and with the sixth-best record in the league.

And Brown is quick to make the comparisons.

“Brunson reminds me a lot of Chauncey [Billups],” Brown says. “The way RJ Barrett has improved every year reminds me of Tayshaun [Prince]. And Mitch Robinson, if he can stay on the floor, there’s no telling how good he can be. He has a lot of the qualities that Ben [Wallace] had.

“We kind of had a team that liked each other, and had a mentality they wanted to make their teammates better every game, every practice,” Brown says. “We were defensive-minded and hard-working, and knowing Thibs and what he believes in, I know these Knicks are the same way.”

Those Pistons started the season as a 150-to-1 shot to win the title and were still close to 125-to-1 when the playoffs started, and they started the season slowly before enjoying a 13-game winning streak that was soon followed by a 1-9 stretch.

“I’m the devil, you know that,” Brown says with a laugh. “It took them a long time to get used to this guy sitting on the bench spouting nonsense at them.”

But the pieces started to fit, especially after the Pistons acquired Rasheed Wallace and Mike James on Feb. 29, GM Joe Dumars seeing before anyone else that his team might have a crack at a title.

They won 16 of 19 after the deal, survived two elimination games against the Nets in the Eastern semis and after upsetting the Pacers in six, they steamrolled the two-time defending-champ Lakers (who had Karl Malone and Gary Payton that year in addition to Kobe and Shaq) in the Finals.

Twenty years on, the only Hall of Famer on the roster besides the coach is Wallace, who in many ways completely symbolizes the soul of that ego-free team, which remains a model for how it can get done if you’re a team without a generational superstar.

“I was lucky, I walked into an amazing situation with a lot of guys who were hungry to take the next step,” Brown says. “And they were ready, all of them.”

Are the Knicks? Can they be? Can Brunson keep channeling Billups, can Hart mimic Prince, can Randle be the clutch go-to the way Rip Hamilton was, can the guys off the bench get after it the way Corliss Williamson and Mehmet Okur and Elden Campbell did … and in 2023-24 can any of that matter as much as it did across one magical season 20 years ago?

“The character of the kids on the team and their mindset, to me, reminds me of our team,” Brown says. “I can’t wait to watch them.”