Seventeen years after it was entombed by the World Trade Center attack, the Cortlandt Street station reopened on Saturday, in time for this year’s Sept. 11 memorials.

“We were determined to beat the deadline,” MTA President Andy Byford said of the push to open the station — now named the WTC Cortlandt station — a month ahead of schedule.

“Because it is so poignant and special and sad — but in many ways proud for New Yorkers, because of what happened here.”

The handicapped-accessible station cost more than $180 million to build.

The station is decorated with some of what the 9/11 terrorists tried to destroy: marble mosaics featuring text from the Declaration of Independence and the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“My inspiration really was the site, and the history of the site, and wanting to make something that is beautiful,” said artist Ann Hamilton, who named the mosaic work “Chorus.”

“And it actually allows people perhaps to pause for a moment and really feel a connection to this language, which really, I think, holds some of our highest aspirations,” she told reporters.

Hamilton said she hopes commuters will read the documents and agree with or argue over the words, whether among themselves or silently.

“And it’s very important to me that it be elegant,” she said of the work, a blend of Italian and American marble.

“I think when we see things that are beautiful, maybe our hearts fall open a little bit, and we are a little more generous.”

Much of the station was damaged when the concrete floors of the Twin Towers, each the size of an acre, came pancaking down in an avalanche of flaming rubble, taking the surrounding World Trade Center buildings with them.

The MTA worked quickly to restore 1 and 9, and N and R, train service through more than 1,000 feet of collapsed or damaged tunnels.

But the Cortlandt St. station’s platforms and entrances remained untouched until reconstruction began in 2015, and have been sealed until Saturday’s unveiling.

“They didn’t win,” said Manhattan lawyer Steven Kent, 69, one of the first commuters to use the new station. “The entirety of the World Trade Center is more beautiful than it used to be.”

Additional reporting by Laura Italiano