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He’s one heavenly VIP.
Late Knicks superfan and Celebrity Row mainstay John F. Kennedy Jr. is cheering on his beloved Knicks from a courtside seat in the sky, a pal told The Post.
“I bet he’s cheering from somewhere,” said his close friend and chief of staff, RoseMarie Terenzio.
If John John was still alive today, he’d not only be at Madison Square Garden for the NBA finals — he’d be the most popular and best dressed person there, she added.
“John was the one New Yorker cool enough to make MSG even cooler — and he’d still be the most famous person in the building,” she said.
Kennedy, who lived in Tribeca, was known to sport a tie and button-down shirt for games at the World’s Most Famous Arena when he was going there straight from his Midtown office.
“Whether he was at a sporting event or riding his bike around the city, he always looked sharp, but he never looked like he was trying,” she added.
Kennedy, who owned two pairs of Knicks tickets, one on Celebrity Row and one behind the basket, was at MSG for the 1999 NBA Finals, the last time the Knicks made the championship.
He was even filmed during Game 4 between the Knicks and the Spurs on June 18, 1999.
He died in plane crash a month later at the age of 38.
“He was a huge fan. Whenever he was in town and if he could, he would always go,” she said.
Terenzio, a Bronx native, recalled how her boss presented her with the lavish gift of a courtside seat to watch the Knicks take on the Chicago Bulls in January 1996.
“He took me to a Knicks game for my birthday on Celebrity Row. It was insane,” Terenzio, 60, said.
“And I remember Patrick Ewing waving to him from the Knicks bench, and I looked at him and I went, ‘Are you kidding me?! Did he just wave to you?!’ And he just started laughing.”
She recalled how Kennedy first presented her with the priceless gift.
“He said to me, ‘What are you doing for your birthday? . . . Do you want to go to the Knicks game with me?’ And I remember, I said, ‘You don’t have to take me. Just give me the tickets. I’ll go.’ And he was like, ‘No, I want to go!’ It was really funny.”
Kennedy’s wife, style icon Carolyn Bessette, even offered to help her choose what to wear for the big game.
“She’s like, ‘If you’re going to sit in Celebrity Row with John, we’ve got to figure out your outfit,'” she said.
“I wore black APC pants and a white T-shirt because she was like, ‘You don’t want to look too dressed up. You want to look cool, like a sports fan.'”
Bessette was more of a music fan, and wasn’t interested in accompanying her husband to the Garden, so “he would take his nieces, friends, people who were huge fans,” she said.
Terenzio penned the memoir “Fairy Tale Interrupted: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Loss,” about the “unlikely friendship between America’s favorite First Son and a blue-collar girl from the Bronx.”
The two tickets on Celebrity Row Kennedy split with the CEO of Hachette Filipacchi, David Pecker, publisher of Kennedy’s magazine George.
The other two, which were located two rows behind the basket, he shared with his fraternity brother at Brown University, music supervisor Randy Poster.
“So if he was going to sit in Celebrity Row, he would give the other pair to someone at George or to a friend or somebody he knew,” recalled Terenzio, who worked for the Knicks as an assistant before she landed the job with Kennedy.
JFK Jr. was so generous with his courtside tickets that security at MSG once assumed the ones his friends were holding were fake, Terenzio said.
“John gave Sean Neary, an editor at George, the floor seats. And they thought Sean had fake tickets, like, ‘Wait, you’re not him!'”
English (US)