But that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from calling the Forest Avenue bar in hopes the NCAA basketball pool had somehow been resumed — and at least one other bar is trying to fill the void.

“We still have people coming in looking for it,” Mary Haggerty, wife of Jody’s owner Jody Haggerty, said by telephone from her home yesterday. “I’m sure we would love to see it [come back]. People have been asking for it to come back and they’re hoping, but it’s not going to be this year.”

Meanwhile, most bettors interviewed by the Advance yesterday agreed that the place to bet on the games is Dannyboy’s Tavern, an establishment located about 2 1/2 miles from Jody’s, on Victory Boulevard in Castleton Corners.

“The problem with Jody’s is, no one was paying taxes on it except the last guy who won. It just got too big, and it was blatant that it was getting so huge,” said one patron, picking up a Dannyboy’s betting pool form at Jimmy Max in Westerleigh yesterday. “Let me put it this way: Danny’s is legit, and I haven’t heard of anywhere else.”

The first round of NCAA tournament games begins tomorrow, but most pools focus on naming the Final Four, the ultimate champ and — the tiebreaker — the final game point total.

Dannyboy’s was keeping unusually tight-lipped about what is a legitimate and perfectly legal enterprise, but some estimates put the size of last year’s pool at $200,000. By comparison, Jody’s topped out at a $1.5 million payout at the end of its 29-year-run and was featured in national publications and network news shows.

. . .

Scalpers online are asking for nearly $6,000 for the Mets final Shea game on Sept. 28, while tickets have been seen as high as a whopping $17,000 for the Yanks Sept. 21 match-up against the Orioles. And if you want to see the first All-Star game this summer at Yankee Stadium since 1977, it’ll take $25,000 to snag one ticket on the field championship level.

“Since the game went on sale and sold out (on Feb. 20) the demand is insane,” said Moe Schlachter, who’s asking for at least $3,800 for his pair of championship box seats. He said that since posting his Yankees tickets on Craigslist last week, he has already gotten 20 to 30 responses.

The 22-year-old student guessed that if the Yankees don’t make the playoffs — ensuring that the Sept. 21 game would indeed be the last at the House that Ruth Built — the prices to resell tickets could quadruple.

Face-value field championship box seats at the stadium range from $240 to $380.

The parade marks the first victory march through the Canyon of Heroes for the Giants, a franchise that before Sunday’s upset victory had won the Super Bowl twice. The Yankees were the last New York team to receive the honor, after winning the World Series in 2000.

In preparation for the 11 a.m. parade, the city yesterday procured 1,000 pounds of shredded paper donated by a packing company in Brooklyn, Atlas Materials. The rest of the expected 49 tons of paper will likely come from the bowels of shredders belonging to companies along the route.

Following its first Super Bowl victory, in 1987, the team was denied the opportunity to hold a ticker-tape parade because Mayor Koch said he didn’t recognize the Giants as a New York team after their decision to move to New Jersey for a lucrative stadium deal.

Yet no matter how good such victories may feel — and it’s getting somewhat harder to remember — Yankee championships have always felt a bit more like the divine right of a king than the conquest of a warrior; a bit more about the payrolls than the putouts; and, when you really get down to it, a bit more of the same.

Not so the Giants’ stunning win in the Super Bowl on Sunday night, a victory that actually felt victorious. In the unfamiliar role of the underdog, New Yorkers finally had a chance to savor the sweet taste of a triumph that wasn’t only unexpected but was utterly deserved.

“Everybody’s a Giants fan tonight,” said John Johnson, 55, a native Floridian who ran out of the Millennium Hotel in Midtown with a double Crown Royal, neat, still in hand. “We knew there was going to be pandemonium, and we wanted to be a part of it.”

Scores of sports fans stampeded Times Square from neighboring hotels and restaurants, lining the intersection of 43rd Street and Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Officers on horseback yelled into megaphones, “Please do not block the crosswalk,” as they struggled to hold back the raucous, quickly forming crowd, which eventually stretched back four blocks.

. . .

One Sunnyside resident, Luis Pinzon, 27, was overcome with joy. “We finally beat Boston,” he said, wearing a Lawrence Taylor jersey. “That’s all I care about. We finally beat ’em. Not Boston. Undefeated Boston,” he said with vindictive relish. “That’s who we beat. As long as they won, I don’t care if the Yankees lose to the Red Sox for the next five years. I’m not going to complain. That’s enough. I’ll give my first-born child to — to — to whomever.”