These are the kinds of nights that can snap a cold spell in half — the kind that jolt a slumping star out of a month-long haze and remind everyone why he’s supposed to matter. The start of this NBA season has been something close to a nightmare for Karl-Anthony Towns, maybe the worst shooting stretch of his basketball life at any level.

But maybe it was all a dream, and in Brooklyn, inside Barclays Center, it felt like someone finally shook him awake. And now — at least the Knicks hope — Towns is wide-awake. They’re going to need him sooner rather than later, because he’s the swing piece in a Knicks offense that can reach heights this franchise has never touched if every cog fires.

Towns is the second-biggest cog. And for the first 15 games of the Mike Brown era, he hadn’t quite found wh

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