This week seemed like a good time to check out a Stephen Curry performance at Madison Square Garden. He recently had produced career-high scoring games of 62 and 57 points. And it was at this very stage of the NBA season in 2013—late February—that his 54-point outburst at the Garden prompted Wall Street Journal sports reporter Ben Cohen to conclude that Curry became “singularly responsible for a fundamental shift in basketball strategy that filtered down to every level of the sport.”

Curry’s audacious utilization of the three-point shot that night was featured prominently in Cohen’s 2020 book, “The Hot Hand; the Mystery and the Science of Streaks.” Curry’s Golden State Warriors lost that game to the New York Knicks. But so riveting was the Curry show that the partisan Knicks crowd increasingly threw its emotional and vocal support his way.

Double-teamed, hounded off the dribble, cornered in far reaches beyond the three-point arc, Curry kept hurling his long-range thunderbolts, a lesson in the physics of the perfect parabola. Flawless arches, launched with a sudden flick of his wrists through considerable space, right to the bottom of the net.

I was working that evening as Newsday’s second-banana, tasked with coming up with some pertinent sidebar to go with our beat reporter’s game story and, by halftime, Curry obviously was my topic. He ultimately converted 18 of 28 field-goal attempts, including an impossible 11 of 13 three-pointers, some of those on which Knicks players swore Curry “couldn’t even see the basket.”

And it wasn’t just those sublime rainbows that were redefining an event as Garden-variety, the very antithesis of “commonplace.” Curry’s game was displaying all colors to the Knicks, lacking no imagination whatsoever. Deft passing, whirligig circumnavigation of defenders, soft floating layups.

The complete procedure resembled a basketball version of triple bypass surgery on the Knicks, giving them whiplash with his darting crossover dribbles. Only his height—6-3—was not outsized. He played all 48 minutes, had team highs in rebounds (six) and assists (seven.)

Afterwards, Curry compared the escalating perfection to a pitcher finishing a no-hitter, aware that “my teammates were jiving,” that there “was a lot of energy in that arena….Once I started to get some numbers, you could hear the crowd a little bit. It was electric. So I was kind of running off adrenaline down the stretch.

“When I get good looks and see the ball go in a couple of times, I was going to take it, no matter where I was on the floor.”

At the time, Curry was a fourth-year pro. His two league MVP honors, seven All-Star designations and three championship seasons still were in the future. But he had been a breakout college star for Davidson, and his Warriors coach in 2013, Mark Jackson, made it clear that the 54 points were not so surprising.

“To the viewing audience, that’s getting hot,” Jackson said. “To us, that’s Steph Curry. That’s who he is. He’s a knockdown shooter as good as anybody who’s played.”

Jackson had spent 11 years playing for St. John’s University and the Knicks at the Garden, the so-called basketball Mecca, and pointed out that “I’ve seen a lot of great performances in this building. But this goes up there. That shooting performance was a thing of beauty.”

And within four years of that night, Cohen wrote in “The Hot Hand,” Curry “was the most influential basketball player alive….the best shooter on the planet.”

So this week, seven years since Curry lowered the boom on his sport, he and the Warriors were back at the Garden after a fruitless pandemic-infested season—the Warriors finished in last place and Curry played only five games. And the Hot Hand sense was reviving, with Curry’s 62-point game on Jan 3 and 57 on Feb. 6.

For the first time since March, the Garden allowed some spectators to attend—2,500 rattling around the 19,000-capacity joint—and I was drawn to the small screen. It wasn’t the same as that rollicking 2013 affair, of course, but Curry was Curry, playing with the same deceiving nonchalance—no-look passes, sneaky steals, casually dispatched attempts from great distances.

He led all scorers with 37 points, 26 in the second half, including the go-ahead three-pointer with 3:38 to play. A lesser meteor strike, yes. But another pretty hot hand. Another first-chair virtuoso presentation. Bravo.