It was Terry Collins who was forced to repeat this harshest of sporting truths time and again when he was the manager of the Mets, when Matt Harvey’s elbow would cause alarm bells to go off inside an MRI tube, or Zack Wheeler’s, or when David Wright’s back would betray him or Johan Santana’s shoulder would begin to bark at him. 

“You want to do what you can to protect ’em, but the one thing you can’t do is encase them in bubble wrap,” he would say, and then he would borrow the words of Dr. Frank Jobe, the man who invented Tommy John Surgery: “No matter how hard you try, if they’re gonna break, they’re gonna break.” 

This is Mike Brown’s task now. Brown has long been a fierce believer in the idea of tuning out noise and the opinions of others; forever he has preached that the only issues worth focusing on are the things you can control. 

If he was any less committed to that ideal, the news that circulated early Thursday evening about Mitch Robinson’s broken right pinky might have invited him to a dark place. After all, the Knicks have done almost everything right in these playoffs, notably the back-to-back sweeps with which they ousted the 76ers and Cavaliers from the playoffs.