The Garden's last stand?

Turn down the lights and cue that catchy "I'm Coming Home" song. The time has come for a powerful dose of Melodrama at the Garden, and not a moment too soon.

Down two games to none to the lordly Celtics and potentially down two key players, the Knicks find themselves with only two relatively sure things entering Game 3 Friday night.

There is Carmelo Anthony, and there is the building he openly longed to move into.

The Knicks hope the combined forces are enough to get them back into their first-round playoff series and fashion a poetic last stand at the famous old arena.

It will be 10 years to the day since they last won a home playoff game, a long time between opponents bearing the full brunt of Knicks fans' playoff fever.

There also is this: Unless the Rangers or Knicks survive into next week, this will be the last weekend of the Garden as we have known it for most of the past four decades.

Come autumn, the lower bowl will have been "transformed" -- to use official Garden terminology for the ongoing renovation -- and Knicks fans will be paying an average of 49 percent more to be in the building.

So this spring is both the beginning of a new era for the Knicks and the end of an old one. They hope their fans will help make it a long goodbye.

"I'm pretty sure it'll be crazy," Anthony said. "I think crazy is an understatement, but that's the word I'm going to use right now. The fans are excited; the whole city is excited.

"This is the first game we've had here in a long time in the playoffs. We understand that. As players, we know we're on our home court. We want to match the fans' energy."

Not that Anthony has any firsthand experience playing at the Garden as a Knick in the postseason. No current Knick does. So I settled for assistant GM Allan Houston. How would he advise them?

"It's going to be fun; it's going to be very exciting," said Houston, who turned 40 Wednesday. "But I would focus on the task at hand and do what you've been doing the whole year and let that carry you.

"The emotion and energy is a given. That's icing on the cake. First you have to bake the cake."

Team president Donnie Walsh, who led the Pacers into the Garden for several classic playoff battles in the 1990s, said "it's probably the best atmosphere in the league."

But he cautioned that playoff-caliber teams and their stars often draw as much inspiration from a hostile crowd as home players do. (Did someone say Reggie Miller?)

"These aren't teams that are going to get intimidated by it," he said.

Still, Walsh said, he recalled times in the '90s when the energy level was "off the charts. You could feel the building moving. I could tell it jacked up the Knicks."

The Garden and its fans landed in the news this week when Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau dissed the locker rooms, benches and level of crowd noise.

Understandably, Rangers fans let him have it verbally during Game 4 -- not that that prevented his team from winning in the second overtime period.

Celtics coach and former Knick Doc Rivers knew better. He praised the place Wednesday, saying even young players not from New York, including his children, still dream of playing there.

"It's special to every single player because it's the only arena left," he said. "There's no other arena in the NBA that has memory. All the other ones have been blown up, and they've put new ones in."

They aren't blowing up the Garden this summer, but they do plan to make it look like new. This is the last chance to leave behind a few more memories first.

The Dolan family owns

controlling interest in the Knicks, Rangers, Madison Square Garden and Cablevision. Cablevision owns Newsday.