Was there any doubt that Jalen Brunson would take the shot  . . . and hit it?

DETROIT

Seriously, what did you expect?

Jalen Brunson did it again. He came up big when the Knicks needed it most. He shrugged off miss after miss before landing a three-point dagger with 4.3 seconds left in Game 6 to lift his team to a series-clinching 116-113 victory over the Pistons on Thursday night.

With a single shot, Brunson rewrote history. Instead of the enduring picture of this series being him trapped at the scorer’s table in the Game 5 loss, it will be of his throwing kisses to a stunned crowd after eliminating their team in six games.

The Knicks reached the Eastern Conference semifinals for the third straight year, and they will begin play Monday against the defending champion Celtics in Boston.

Until Brunson hit the game-winner, it looked very likely that they might not get to the next round or would at least have to play a Game 7 to get there.

Brunson struggled in the fourth quarter as the Knicks blew a 12-point lead. Still, after Cade Cunningham missed a jumper with the score tied at 113 and Josh Hart’s rebound gave the Knicks the ball with 20.6 seconds to play, there was little doubt who was going to take the last shot. Brunson, who had been held in check all quarter by Ausar Thompson, let the clock run down before crossing over at the top of the key and hitting the three-pointer.

“I don’t really go and think, ‘All right, I’m gonna make this move right here.’ It’s just instinct,” Brunson said of the game-winner. “He beat me to the spot. He cut me off. Just went back the other way, and I found a lot of space, and I was able to take a shot. That dude was tough to play against. He is big time. And I told him straight to his face after the series, he made me work, so I have a lot of respect for him.”

Brunson’s teammates were not surprised by the way it all ended.

“High-pressure situations never faze him,” Mikal Bridges said. “He’s even-keeled the whole night. I was watching him and hoping he would get some separation. Once he did, it was curtains. When he made his shot, I thought I made it, I was so geeked up.”

Brunson finished with 40 points but was 3-for-13 in the quarter before his final shot.

Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said it takes a unique kind of player to operate under that kind of pressure.

“He’s at his best when his best is needed. He’s done it all year,” Thibodeau said. “We talk about all the intangibles. It’s just makeup. Oftentimes that’s where mistakes are made in the draft and things like that. It’s easy to see how many points a guy scores or physical tools are, but when you look at the mental tools, that’s everything.

“It’s how you deal with it if you miss a shot. He comes back and shoots the next one great. He may miss it, but he’ll shoot the next one. It’s just having that belief and confidence.”

We have all become so addicted to Brunson’s late-game heroics in this series that we have come to expect it. He is that incredible dessert that rescues a disappointing meal. He’s what keeps you glued to your seats and believing that the whole thing just might work out.

In the first four games of the series, Brunson scored 12, 14, 12 and 15 points in the fourth quarters. The Knicks won three of those games and might have won a fourth if Bridges hadn’t had a dismal fourth quarter in Game 2. The Knicks then lost Game 5 after Brunson couldn’t get back on the court in a timely fashion because Thibodeau didn’t want to use his final timeout to get him back on the court.

The pressure had been on the Knicks and Brunson all series. The Pistons were the feel-good story no one expected to be here. The Knicks had made big moves in the  offseason to take their team to the next level, to put themselves among the league’s elite.

Beginning on Monday, they will have a chance to see if there is any reality to the aspirations they carried into the season. But on Friday, the mood was all celebratory as the Knicks found a way to close this thing out.

Said Brunson: “We’re a tough group. Everyone likes to paint us as not, but we’re a tough, physical group. This was a physical series. It was a grueling series. And I think we showed our physicality, our toughness, but also our mental toughness. The way we handled adversity. During those adverse situations, we banded together. We didn’t play as individuals. It was a great series for us.”

And for him.

By Barbara Barker

barbara.barker@newsday.commeanbarb

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.