It went from a collar dream to a collar meme.
Eight years after an angry Knicks fan sold his “cheerleaders” on eBay because the team was so bad, he insists he’s not crying now that they’ve reached the NBA Finals.
“I have no regrets,” rebounder Evan Perlmutter told The Post, after the Knicks made their first tournament appearance since 1999.
The sports marketing executive from Long Island auctioned off his undying loyalty to the home team in 2018.
His “mounting frustration” was steadily growing as the powerful team of the 1990s — with players like Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson, whose posters adorned his childhood room — became the laughingstock of the league.
The frustrated 40-year-old fan blamed the team’s front office, saying: “The circus… started at the top.”
So, in a final act of desperation, he wrote an emotional 2,000-word cry for help on eBay, titled: “Angry New York Knicks Fans Are Fed Up, Sell My Fans.”
It caught the attention of A A YouTuber from Southern California named James Riddellwho offered a cool $3,450 — on the condition that Perlmutter become a Los Angeles Lakers fan.
He did so gladly.
“It really made him a Lakers fan,” Riddle, 30, triumphantly told The Post, referring to the 2020 championship win Perlmutter enjoyed.
Perlmutter, a former ad sales employee at Madison Square Garden, says he never looked back.
“All the coaches the Knicks have had, the terrible trades, the management, how they treat the fan base year after year, decade after decade, combined,” he said.
But as the Knickerbockers this month swept one opponent after another in one playoff game (and the Lakers were unceremoniously eliminated in the second round), he began to pay the price.
“You know you want to support the Knicks now,” other sarcastic texts from friends poured in.
However, the traitor will not back down.
“It’s a false feeling that the team is good,” he sniffed. “The cards have fallen in their favor. They are more fortunate than good.”
And he had this prediction for Knicks fans: “The Knicks won’t win the Finals.”
but “Damn Knicksa short film by Knicks fan and director Bobby Friedman loosely based on Perlmutter’s life, has a different ending: The New Yorker who sells his loyalty to the Knicks becomes the laughingstock of the basketball world when the team changes hands.