They are just good enough to anger you. They are just good enough to annoy you. They are just good enough to Michael Corleone you — just when you think you’re out, they drag you back in. Again and again and again.

And just good enough to make you throw up your arms in aggravation as you tear up your ticket stubs — OK, nobody has ticket stubs anymore, but you’d rip ’em up if you had ’em — as you walk out of Madison Square Garden and head for your train.

They are your New York Knicks at the halfway point of this 2022-23 basketball season, a team that is 22-19, a team that is defined almost entirely by this excruciating 111-107 loss to the Bucks Monday night at the Garden.

There were stretches against Milwaukee — an elite East Conference team even with Khris Middleton still in mothballs — when the 18,167 inside MSG could truly believe they were watching the Knicks at their very best — tenacious, resilient, hitting the open man and hitting their open shots, building a 17-point lead.

And other stretches when … well, they looked incapable of doing anything right. The Bucks outscored them by 20 points across the final 14 minutes and 12 seconds of the game. At home. In front of fans who are beyond desperate to want to embrace them, enfold them, proffer their hearts to them. All of them begging for a legit signature win. All of them left wanting.

Good enough to make you dream.

Bad enough to make you slam a dashboard on the drive home.

“Take on the challenge, play as hard as you can,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “But we fell short in the end.”

Said Jalen Brunson: “You saw a championship team just grind us down.”

The Knicks closed out their first half with an intriguing test against the Bucks, one of the NBA’s branded elites; more interesting is the next few weeks. The six seed is begging to be seized by the first team able to put an extended winning streak together.

Between now and a tricky three-games-in-five days gauntlet later this month (home to the Cavaliers, at Boston, at Brooklyn), the Knicks will have six games against teams who are behind them in the East (Toronto and Washington twice, the Pistons and Hawks) and another, the Pacers at the Garden Wednesday, who are just an eyeblink ahead of them.

It’s a good time to get fat, if they can.

Will they? Can they? Right now, they project as a 44-win team which is, more or less, exactly where many expected them to be from the first moment of the season in Memphis in October.

Right now they are a part of the swollen middle class in the East; once you get past the top five, would any of these teams — Knicks, Pacers, Heat, Raptors, Bulls, Hawks — surprise you if they wound up securing the sixth slot and avoided the play-in? And one of those teams is going to miss the postseason altogether.

“That’s the league,” Thibodeau said last week. “It sounds like a cliché when you say it, about how anyone is capable of beating anyone else on any night but when you have this many good players and this many good coaches, it follows that it’s just hard to win, no matter who you’re playing and no matter what the record says you are.”

The Knicks may embody that as quintessentially as anyone.

“It’s a make-or-miss league,” Julius Randle said, appropriate on a night when he was 1-for-12 from 3, a night when the Knicks wasted Brunson’s career-high 44, a night when they went big-game hunting and wound up tripping on a patch of ice.

It’s what they do. It’s who they are. They are 22-19 at the midway points and by Wednesday may be as healthy as they’ve been in over a month if RJ Barrett can suit up against the Pacers. They have already absorbed a handful of hard-to-believe losses and shrugged off the inclination to dive off a cliff.

They are good enough to make you believe they can be even better. They taunt you. They tease you. They tempt you. Can they ever make all of that wishful thinking pay a dividend? The first 41 games make you ask the question. The final 41 will give you an answer.