NEW YORK — Mike Brown calls it a “bunker mentality.” It’s something he learned from longtime and Hall of Fame-bound San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich as an assistant in the early 2000s.

“When you get to this level,” Brown said, “or you’re playing in a bigger market especially, there’s going to be a lot of noise.”

Crafting the proverbial bunker around the team residing in the world’s premier media market was priority No. 1 when Brown took the job replacing Tom Thibodeau as head coach at One Penn Plaza in July. For 82 games and three-plus playoff rounds, the bunker remained impenetrable. The Knicks tuned out their fans and detractors alike. They tuned out all outside expectations, because nothing could amount to the standard they, themselves, set inside their own locker room.

They were deaf to the world, because the world will love you today and hate you tomorrow. All the Knicks ever needed was inside the winding corridors stitching together Madison Square Garden.

And then came Game 3 of the NBA Finals, the first NBA Finals game at MSG in 27 years, a must-win game for the Spurs, who forfeited home-court advantage and spotted the Knicks a 2-0 series lead at San Antonio’s Frost Bank Center.

The Knicks had a chance to do something special, to take the kind of 3-0 series lead no team in NBA playoff history has ever overcome, and to do it in front of their own home fans, in front of a sellout Garden crowd paying for some of the most expensive tickets to a sporting event in human history.

The stakes were impossible to ignore. President Donald Trump became the first sitting United States president to attend an NBA Finals game — and the heightened security and Secret Service presence set the tone long before tipoff of Game 3 at The Garden. Celebrity Row expanded well beyond its bounds. Actors, entertainers and athletes suddenly became game-day MSG staff. Grammy award-winning artist Cardi B performed during halftime.

For the first time, that bunker the Knicks built came crashing down beneath the weight of an entire city’s yearning to call its team — this team — NBA champions. Those fans will have to wait: The Knicks lost to the Spurs, 115-111, and now hold a 2-1 series lead in the NBA Finals.

“You’re going to hit some adversity throughout the course of the season, and this is what I talked about when I said, you know, you hoped you hit adversity because you want to see how everybody reacts, not just the players,” Brown continued. "I want to see how Mr. [James] Dolan was going to react. I want to see how [team president] Leon Rose is going to react, their group, on top of the players. Because one of them, all of them, can get pissed at me and say, screw this, we’re done. Or you could try to keep fighting, stay even-keeled and try to figure it out.”

The Knicks were not the poised, even-keeled group responsible for weathering storms and punching the franchise’s first NBA Finals appearance in more than a quarter century. For the first time, they were rattled beyond recognition: They turned the ball over on the opening two possessions of the first quarter — then did it again to open the second half. They fell behind 12 points in the first quarter, fought like hell to rally back in typical Knicks fashion, then found themselves down late in the fourth.

This time, the Spurs were the ones with noise-cancelling headphones around their ears. They tuned out the stats: only five of the 37 teams to trail 0-2 in the NBA Finals have ever come back to win the series, none of them being teams who lost at home and were tasked with winning two on the road. The Spurs were the team who were considered too young, too inexperienced to have the resolve and resilience to win on such a big stage.

They went inside the Knicks’ bunker and took it for themselves.

The Spurs live to fight another day. The Knicks must do some soul searching. Monday, in front of their own home fans, they did not play Knicks basketball. They generated just 18 assists to San Antonio’s 28. They turned the ball over 13 times, five more than their opponent. Their captain, Jalen Brunson, attempted 25 field goals and made only 11. No other Knicks player took more than 12 shots. Brunson finished the game minus-nine, while the Knicks outscored the Spurs by five in Jose Alvarado’s nine minutes on the floor.

The Knicks, who’ve risen to every occasion presented to them this season, couldn’t meet the moment in Game 3. They lost the game before it ever tipped-off. They lost it when the bunker that’s been intact all season long cracked beneath the pressure of a fan base still awaiting its first champion in more than 53 years.

They must find a way to stitch it back together. Their championship hopes depend on it.

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