As a sporting city, we almost always get this stuff right. When we gather in one of our buildings, old or new, we know how to rock its walls and rattle its foundation, how to pay proper tribute to the very best before us, better than anyone, anywhere.

As they’ve resuscitated and revived their season these past few weeks, one by one so many of the Mets have remarked at how Citi Field sounds, looks, feels whenever something good is happening. Michael Confoto called it “addicting … you want to find a way to make it feel that way every game.”

It’s nothing new to us or to the athletes who have heard us for decades, to a cavalcade of Yankees who heard the deafening thunder of a Yankee Stadium October, to the old Knicks of the ’70s and the ’90s who can still summon goose pimples on demand recalling the Garden’s acoustic majesty, to the football Giants who could reduce the old Meadowlands Stadium to auditory dust, to the way Shea Stadium’s lower grandstands used to rock, violently, whether the featured attraction was a Joe Namath pass or an Endy Chavez catch or The Who launching into “Baba O’Riley.”

Never was it put to words better than by the great W.C. Heinz, who, in the June 14, 1948 edition of the New York Sun, described Babe Ruth’s final ascent to the field at Yankee Stadium thusly:

“The Babe took a step and started slowly up the steps. He walked out into the flashing of flashbulbs, into the cauldron of sound he must know better than any other man …”

Almost always.

We got it wrong last year, though, on the afternoon of Sept. 8, as the sun set on Arthur Ashe Stadium and a brand-new tennis star officially capped her rise to glory. Naomi Osaka, all of 20 years old, won her first tennis major that day, dominating her hero, Serena Williams, in a 6-2, 6-4 rout to capture the U.S. Open.

Open crowds, especially, are known to recognize a moment and treat it accordingly. Open crowds have long understood precisely when the narrative of their noise should turn from scorn — whether it was aimed at youthful flame-throwers Jimmy Connors or John McEnroe or the look-at-me curiosity of Andre Agassi — to unconditional love. All of them — and others — have heard both ends of the verbal spectrum.

“When New York cheered for me,” Connors said in 1999, “I knew I’d earned it.”

The problem last Sept. 8 wasn’t that people didn’t feel warmly toward Osaka; there were plenty of those who understood the moment and cheered for her. But that was also the day when Serena Williams melted down inexplicably and uncontrollably, earning three code violations that resulted first in a forfeited point and then in a lost game.

Williams acted like a boor, like a spoiled brat, and it was embarrassing to behold. But she is also the most popular player in women’s tennis and much of Ashe Stadium agreed she had been unfairly judged by chair umpire Carlos Ramos — whom Williams called, in front of live microphones and a worldwide audience, “a thief.”

Those supporters — or enablers — turned the trophy presentation ugly with boos. It was a terrible moment for tennis and for New York audiences who are generally better than that. It drove Osaka to tears in what should have been her finest moment. It was grossly unfair.

So treat next week as a do-over.

Take a mulligan.

Osaka, the No. 1 seed of this Open and the No. 1-ranked player in the world, will play Russia’s Anna Blinkova, world No. 93, in the first round early next week. It would behoove the folks who schedule the tournament to make the Osaka-Blinkova match the first night pairing of Week 1, so a full house can make sure to be at Ashe on time and do what it should have done 50 weeks before.

Stand. And cheer. And keep standing. And keep cheering.

It won’t be the same, can never be the same. That opportunity dissolved in a haze of misassigned emotion last Sept. 8. But it’s not a bad place to start. And won’t be a bad place to be. The match itself promises to be one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it early-round specials, but that’s beside the point.

Osaka may well win so many majors by the time she’s done that what happened last September will be a forever footnote. That’s beside the point, too.

We have a chance to make things right. That’s the point. That’s why we need to stand up, why we need to cheer, for a full minute, two minutes, five. That’s who we are.