In the end, it turns out that Kyrie Irving didn’t need James Harden to be one of his wingmen over there on the Brooklyn side of the East River. All he needed was Eric Adams, mayor of New York City, shaking and baking on the subject of vaccines, posting and toasting, finally faking one way and then going another.

We don’t know if Adams will win or lose with a flip flop move on vaccines that ought to be named after him, like one of those figure skating moves, just in light of all the people of the city who lost jobs for their refusal to get vaccinated, so many of them from the Dept. of Education. But one thing is certain:

Kyrie wins.

Now let’s see if he can help the Nets win, if the Nets can do what Kyrie and Kevin Durant came here to do, which means win an NBA championship, win the first NBA title in New York City in almost 50 years exactly. Kyrie gets to play home games now, despite his unchanged chuckle-hut stance on vaccines. He gets to play everywhere except Canada, which could be a problem if the Nets end up in a play-in opener against the Raptors.

This is all because Adams, who told Irving that if he wanted to play he needed to get jabbed until he didn’t, decided to be the one to send Kyrie — the new Doc for the Nets because he knows so, so much about science — into the game, along with the other high-profile, un-vaxxed players with the Yankees and with the Mets. Those baseball players also get rewarded for bad behavior. But then that happens in sports all the time, doesn’t it, for all kinds of bad behavior, extreme and otherwise, all over the map?

Just look around. The other day an American tennis player named Jenson Brooksby threw down his racket, and it ended up hitting a ball person in the leg. You know what Brooksby got for that? A point penalty. At least when Novak Djokovic underhanded that ball in frustration at the U.S. Open and the ball ended up hitting a lineswoman in the throat, he got properly bounced from the tournament.

Kyrie? He gets what he wants without having to get a shot, just in time for the playoffs. Adams treats Irving like some sort of essential New Yorker here. Except that he’s not. Before Adams’ flip flop, Kyrie was in the process of stubbornly and selfishly and even arrogantly ruining his team’s shot at a title before Mayor Adams stepped in. This is a guy who ran for the office acting like he was different from other politicians. Not so much, as it turns out.

A couple of weeks ago when he asked about Kyrie Irving’s status Adams said, “He can play tomorrow. Get vaccinated.”

Now he says that Irving can remain unvaccinated and now play home games for the Nets. And that the unvaccinated baseball players — Anthony Rizzo? Aaron Judge? Jacob deGrom? — can play home games when the regular season starts, the Yankees opening against the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium on April 7, and the Mets playing their first games at Citi Field a week later.

“I’m mayor of the city and I’m going to make some tough choices. People are not going to agree with some of them. I was not elected to follow. I was not elected to be fearful but to be fearless. I must move this city forward.”

The idea, by the way, that you can only move the city forward with all players, vaccinated or unvaccinated, getting to play home games within the city limits is an idea made of air. Hot air, mostly.

“I’m not making this decision loosely or haphazardly,” Adams continued. “The city has to function. Some will boo us, others will cheer us — that is not only a game of baseball but that’s the game of life and we have to be on the field in order to win.”

The game of life. Got it. Tell that to the teachers and the cops and everybody else in town who didn’t get the same rights or the same consideration as athletes making millions. They made the same bad decision that the athletes have made about this pandemic, whose numbers once again starting to rise in New York City. They just didn’t get a soft place to land from the mayor of the city.

So Kyrie played the long game enough on vaccinations to get what he wanted in the end. He gets to play all Nets games before they get to the playoffs, and no one is supposed to wonder where his team would be in the Eastern Conference standings if he’d been there for his team all along. And if Durant is still OK with that, well, KD can blow that out his ear.

All of these unvaccinated guys wanted to be noble here. Their bodies, their choice. But this is a choice that affects others, has affected others all along, with a hundred-year health crisis that isn’t close to going away. But it’s all right. The mayor says that winning baseball games and basketball games, this deep into the pandemic, is essential to city-wide morale. In a pig’s eye, it is.

It was my friend Chris Smith, a terrific writer for Vanity Fair, who made this observation on Twitter the other day:

“The most recent championship of a major pro sports team that plays its games in New York City was the 2009 Yankees. So we better not depend on that stuff for morale.”

Can sports lift a city? Of course it can. Can it make us feel as if we’re all in it together. Yes. It can. We saw it after Sept. 11 when the Yankees were winning those crazy World Series games at the old Stadium while the work at Ground Zero went on. But after what the city and country have experienced since March of 2020, when everything began to shut down, it is going to take a lot more than sports to put the life of the city back together this time around.

All we know for sure now is that Kyrie Irving, the would-be basketball prince of the city, gets to stop being a temp and goes back to being a full-time player. Maybe now he could go win some damn games, after the mayor gives him and his team the biggest assist of their season.

THE ACES OF SPRING, PEACOCKS A REAL CINDERELLA STORY & KNICK FANS PLAY THE BLAME GAME …

Maybe there will be a more fun spring training moment than the one we get on Sunday in Port St. Lucie when both Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer pitch in the same game for the Mets, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head.

I know I’ve asked this question before, but how is it that the Yankees, the team of Joe D. and The Mick, and even Bernie Williams, don’t have a center fielder?

Coach K is obviously a great story of this NCAA men’s tournament, because he is arguably the greatest men’s college basketball coach of all time.

He just hasn’t been the best story.

Because the Saint Peter’s Peacocks have.

They always sell you Cinderella at this time of year.

Finally, we got a real Cinderella, all the way to this Sunday.

Maybe it was as simple as this for Ashleigh Barty, the No. 1 women’s tennis player in the world, who retired this week at the age of 25:

Maybe she just loved being home more than she loved being the No. 1 women’s tennis player in the world.

Maybe she had her own way of keeping score all along.

Speaking of tennis:

Isn’t it amazing that the people in charge of the men’s side of the sport always end up hiding under their desks every time another player throws a racket, or beats it against the umpire’s chair?

What I’m wondering is this:

How come Fed and Rafa managed to win all those majors without throwing furniture around?

There is such a low bar for our elected politicians embarrassing themselves in front of the country, but the Republicans who questioned Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson this week brought to mind a famous old country line:

From the gutter to them is not up.

Are Giants fans certain they wouldn’t rather have Baker Mayfield as their quarterback?

My pal Barry Stanton says that the Giants and Jets need to understand that money and hoarding draft picks only help you if you use all that to acquire talent.

And know how to acquire talent.

One thing never changes with March Madness:

One week after the tournament ends, casual sports fans forget the names of both starting fives from the finals.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to keep up with Knick fans:

Is this all Julius Randle’s fault?

Or is it all the fault of Coach Thibs?

Working as a sports executive at Madison Square Garden is the equivalent of being in Federal Witness Protection.

You just don’t have to change your name or move out of town.

I am going to ask this again:

When is James Dolan going to put one of Walt Frazier’s sports jackets in the rafters along with No. 10?

Because we absolutely need one more Walt Frazier Night at that place, just because there will never be a figure anything like him in the history of basketball in our city.

Smarter basketball fans than I am will have to explain why the Grizzlies have a better record without Ja Morant than they do with him.

I immediately dismissed the Tom Brady-to-Dolphins rumor — which would have meant Brady going back to the AFC East — on Friday for this reason:

Even God doesn’t hate the Jets that much.

Free Brittney Griner.

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