PHILADELPHIA — It could have been the start of something big. Maybe it should have been. Crazy as it sounds, when Game 1 between the 76ers and New York Knicks tips off Saturday at Madison Square Garden, it will mark the first time the teams have faced each other in the playoffs in 35 years. And the final image of that series was the sort of moment from which blood feuds are born. Just not in this case.

Doesn’t feel right, does it? Philly-New York is supposed to be a bitter rivalry, at least around here. Usually is. Eagles-Giants, Phillies-Mets, Flyers-Rangers — those games all matter a little more. For Sixers-Knicks, though, the timing was never right.

When the Sixers were good, the Knicks weren’t. When the Knicks were good — and hey, it had been a while until Jalen Brunson showed up — the Sixers weren’t. In that context, it’s understandable that what happened on May 2, 1989, remains mostly a distant memory and isn’t considered the kind of anecdote that, if you mention it, immediately raises a Philly fan’s blood temperature to 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

A refresher, in case you don’t remember or have never looked back so far: That night, the Knicks completed a three-games-to-none series victory over the Sixers in the Eastern Conference quarterfinals, beating them in overtime at the Spectrum, 116-115. And after the horn blared and while Charles Barkley lay supine at midcourt, distraught and disbelieving that his team had lost, the Knicks — Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, Mark Jackson, all of the Knicks — grabbed a dust mop from under one of the baskets and started pushing it across the court.

A sweep. Get it?

“It kind of rankled us a little bit,” John Nash, the Sixers’ general manager then, said Thursday.

Can’t blame them. It wasn’t as if the Knicks demolished the Sixers. They outscored them by just eight points in the series. New York’s one-point win in Game 3 came three days after a one-point win in Game 2. And Barkley was the series’ best player, putting up 27 points and pulling down nearly 12 rebounds a game and shooting 64% from the field.

“Charles was great, and that’s why we should have won,” former Sixers coach Jim Lynam said. “Patrick was really good. Charles was better.”

The Knicks were talented and deeper, though, with Rick Pitino, in his second season as head coach, pushing them to play an up-tempo style even with the plodding Ewing as the franchise centerpiece. They went 52-30 to win the Atlantic Division and were the NBA’s third-highest scoring team, and the difference against the Sixers, the factor that swung the series, was the teams’ backcourts. Jackson, Rod Strickland, and Gerald Wilkins outplayed Maurice Cheeks and rookie Hersey Hawkins, who missed 21 of his 24 shots.

The games themselves were tense and physical, on the floor and elsewhere. Hundreds of Knicks fans traveled to the Spectrum for Game 3. At times, they chanted, “SWEEP! SWEEP!” Several fights broke out. Trash talk flew back and forth between players. New York’s didn’t mind. Strutting came naturally to them. “They had been talking, saying negative things,” Ewing said of the Sixers. “So I wanted to rub it in a little bit.”

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