If you saw the game, you figured Paul Pierce was done. Certainly for the game. Probably for the season. Maybe for his career.

He went down in a writhing heap. As if he had been pole-axed. He clawed at his knee and was grimacing horribly. It had to be awful. Had to be.

After a few minutes of ugly squirming, beneath the basket, two Celtics players picked up Pierce and carried him off the court, and to a wheelchair, and there went one-third of Boston’s Big Three, rolling off to the locker room … Pierce’s head lolling in apparent agony as he went up the hall. Was he in tears, too? Might have been.

So what happens? We found out he had a major knee injury? That he had to be “put down” like a race horse?

Well, of course not. Exactly 1:45 had elapsed from the game clock before Pierce was … still alive? … going to be ready to come back next year? … No. On the court. About to make consecutive three-pointers that put the Celtics ahead to stay.

So, yes, Pierce morphed from the writhing and fallen warrior … to the brave El Cid/Willis Reed comeback gut-meister … to the man who hit the two biggest shots of the game … in about 10 minutes real time.

Yes, forgive the Lakers for being skeptical about Pierce and the Celtics and that whole farce.

Phil Jackson couldn’t contain himself, at a news conference today in Boston.

“If I’m not mistaken, I think Willis Reed missed a whole half and three quarters almost of a game and literally had to have a shot, a horse shot, three or four of them in his thigh to come back out and play,” Jackson said, referring to an episode from the 1970 NBA playoffs. “Paul got carried off and was back on his feet in a minute.

“I don’t know if the angels visited him . . . in that timeout period that he had or not, but he didn’t even limp when he came back out on the floor. I don’t know what was going on there. Was Oral Roberts back there in their locker room?”

Oral Roberts being the televangelist who believed in (and was thought by some to perform) miracles.

Pierce said today he expects to play in Game 2, will not have an MRI done … and admitted to a bit of pain. A bit.

Call me callous or old-fashioned, but if you’re an athlete and hit the ground like you’ve been shot, and writhe as if the flames of hell are licking at your feet — you ought to be hurt. For-real hurt.

Most guys who go down like that, and let themselves be carried out like a baby and rolled away like an invalid … they’re messed up.

They certainly aren’t running back into the game a few minutes later. If for no other reason than sheer embarrassment that they overreacted so shamefully.

The whole thing was a joke. I mean, doesn’t Paul Pierce get enough attention? Or are the Celtics that desperate that they need fake dramatics to get the crowd into the game or their team fired up? Or are Boston journalists so creatively bankrupt that they attempt to turn this into The Bloody Sock, Garden-variety? (And the Bloody Sock was laughably over-hyped as well, now that I think of it.)

I don’t blame Phil for being skeptical — if not mocking — of the whole thing.

If Pierce comes back and plays the rest of this series, he joins the Fakers Hall of Fame. If he somehow managed to put in a few minutes because of an adrenaline surge, and actually is hurt … well, then maybe he doesn’t go down as the Laurence Olivier of the modern NBA.