We are all guilty of it. I sure am. We live in a city where every sport has multiple teams, and so that means one of the natural arguments is this: Who owns the town?

In hockey and in football, the answers are, and always have been, easy ones. The Rangers ruled the roost even in years when their chief geographic rivals, the Islanders and Devils, weren’t just successful but dynastic. The Giants? Even when Joe Willie Namath was prince of the city, the Giants held the keys to the kingdom. They were the ones with the generations-long waiting list for season tickets while the Jets struggled to avoid local blackouts.

Baseball? The last 27 years it’s been an unrivaled Yankees town, but from 1962 until 1992 they pingponged ownership with the Mets, who have tried to storm the beaches a few times the past 20 years but never quite got to the rallying point.

In basketball, though? There’s never been a question. The Nets winning two ABA championships in 1974 and ’76 while doing business on Long Island, with Julius Erving leading the way? They were still peasants working in the long shadow of the Knicks’ manor. Going to back-to-back NBA Finals in 2002 and ’03 just as the Knicks were starting their journey through the wilderness, led by the magical hand of Jason Kidd? They were still mosquitoes trying to sting the rhinoceros residing at Madison Square Garden.

Now? Kyrie Irving is here, and will make his debut Wednesday when the Nets host Minnesota at Barclays Center. Kevin Durant is coming sometime, if not late this year then next. An exciting core that scared the swagger out of the Sixers for a few games last spring is already here, and by this time next year could well be a puncher’s-chance pick to win the East.

Meanwhile, the Knicks …

And here’s where it should be different, from the way it’s always been, from the way we’ve always thought. This will never be anyone’s idea of a marketing slogan. But this really should be the Nets’ marketing slogan:

The hell with the Knicks.

Because from this day forward, the Nets really should be viewed as their own entity, their own brand, saddled with their own expectations, beholden to their own fans. Always, in the background, the Nets have been viewed — fairly and unfairly, consciously and subtly — in relation to their behemoth — and bumbling — neighbors to the west, seen through the prism of the Knicks as much as their own.

Even as recently as this week, Kevin Durant was asked by Bleacher Report why he chose the Nets in free agency — but, as has been the case from the day it happened, it wasn’t merely why the Nets but why not the Knicks.

Durant gave an absolutely fair answer: “The Knicks players, they’re good young players, but they still need a little bit more experience to match where I was in my career.”

But the time has arrived — and, speaking honestly, this memo is directed inward, at myself, as much as anywhere else, because I’m as guilty of this as anyone — it really is time to let the Nets live on their own, outside the basketball incubator that’s been run by the Knicks, narrating the hoops agenda in New York forever.

It’s why it was so refreshing to hear Irving say this Tuesday: “For me I just wanted to be in a place, especially being back home, where I could really commit for years to come. It was an easy decision. I was coming here regardless.”

The Knicks aren’t going away, and their fans will still be heard from plenty at Barclays Center, and that will be a source of frustration until it isn’t. But the Nets deserve to be viewed as their own marketplace now — and not just Brooklyn. There are Yankees fans who live in Queens, after all, and Rangers fans who live in New Jersey. These things usually shake out the way they’re going to shake out. Old fans may be stubbornly loyal. But new ones are born every minute, and they’re up for grabs.

In this eighth year of the Nets’ Brooklyn iteration, they have earned — through both seed and expectation — their own path, independent of whatever the Other Guys are doing.

“We can’t worry about what anyone else is up to, whether it’s the Knicks across the river or anyone else across the league,” Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said a few weeks ago. “It’s hard enough work to take care of your own business, your own team, your own destiny. That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll worry about the Nets and have faith that that’ll be good enough.”

Wednesday, against the Timberwolves, is a most helpful time to apply and accept that new New York basketball normal. The Nets have earned that much. And in a time when we search in New York through so much sporting detritus, looking for teams and players we can enjoy watching, the Nets are about to deliver that. Maybe the other team can be like that again someday. They have a ways to go. The Nets are already there. They’re worthy of their own conversation.