SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — There were so many tape recorders on the table that the card with Pat Riley’s name on it got knocked over, and just stayed that way.

Of the six National Basketball Hall of Famers who attended the induction ceremony on Friday,

Riley was by far the most in

demand at the morning press conference.

When you’ve made coaching stops in Los Angeles, New York and Miami, when you’ve won champ­ionships in two of those cities and have become famous world-wide and seen your picture on the cover of GQ magazine, you either get used to being in the public eye, or you don’t.

I’m pretty sure Hakeem Olaj­uwon or Dick Vitale didn’t have to endure any long, convoluted questions that asked them to “free-as­sociate” their answer, as Riley did.

“ ‘Free-associate.’ OK, explain that to me,” he said.

It was all a little surreal.

In one moment, Riley talked about his great Los Angeles Lakers teams, how a bunch of them got together for an impromptu reunion Thursday night. He rattled off the names — “Magic, Norm Nixon, Jamaal Wilkes, Byron Scott, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Mitch,

Kareem, Mychal Thompson.” Jerry West is one of his best friends, he’s on a first-“Zo” basis with Alonzo Mourning, he coached Shaq and Dwyane Wade and he orchestrated the deliciously brutal New York Knicks teams, with Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, Mark Jackson, John Starks and Anthony Mason.

You get 1.29 million Google hits on “Pat Riley.”

Then you hear the same person speak just as easily and authorit­atively about General Electric, Central Park, Linton-Mont Pleasant and the “factory town” of Schenectady that he grew up in.

The same guy.

Riley wears his Schenectady her­itage as comfortably as an Armani suitjacket.

“Back in the ’50s and ’60s, it was idyllic, it really was,” he said. “It simply was what Americana really was about in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Coming from someone else, this might be lip service to the hometown, but it isn’t from Riley.

He can remember how his late father and former coach, Lee, would pack the family Dodge with a few beers, a sandwich and his Camels and sit on a hill in Central Park, where he could pick up Pat’s University of Kentucky games on a Louisville radio station.

As the story goes, Pat Riley, with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his T-shirt, walked past Walt Przybylo’s front porch and called out to the Linton coach that he’d be playing for him that winter. Przybylo angrily informed him that he’d better start thinking about playing for some other high school.

Riley rented a nice bus for a bunch of his Schenectady friends to ride out for the festivities this weekend.

“I was afraid to let everybody drive down,” he said with a chuckle. “We don’t want to give them too much alcohol, pizza or spaghetti prior to the reception. We’re

going to have a lot of fun.”

The president of the Miami Heat, in his crisp new black Hall of Fame blazer, isn’t scheduled to jet back to south Florida just yet, what with the Schenectady school district holding its own hall of fame dinner on Monday at Proctors.

It’s telling that when Riley brought this up, he said, “We’re going to induct three people in there.”

Not “They,” but “We.”