Your San Francisco 49ers will bring their ailing bodies, tattered unis, and first aid trunk to the Big Apple this week to do battle with the New York Giants.

They’ll come limping into MetLife Stadium with a team that is so banged up physically it needs a drum and a fife to make its entry. The home crowd will not be kind.

The 49er Faithful have proven to be road warriors as much as their beloved football team. They’ve turned SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles into Levi’s Stadium South. Last week in Houston may as well have been played on a neutral site. They’ve equalized the playing surface in Seattle, Phoenix and points east. This week: Not so much.

It isn’t that the Faithful won’t show up. It’s that New York fans simply have the lung capacity of a bull elephant. It’s born of years of barking at cab drivers, bitching at waitresses, bullying salespeople and generally hating and disrespecting anything or anyone who doesn’t begin a sentence with the word “yo.”

Coincidentally, I’m in New York this week, too. And, like most New Yorkers, I have no desire to go the game. The reason is, the game isn’t in New York. The Giants (and the Jets) play in Jersey (or Joisy), which is across the Hudson River from New York City and therefore considered, according to a once-published map of New York, the west coast.

So, I’m going to allow for the fact that the New York fan I came to love while living and working here, is somewhat watered down in Rutherford, New Jersey. Don’t get me wrong here. They are still obnoxious, but their vitriol is compromised by those who come from the tony suburbs of New Jersey where the pointed leather object that the quarterback throws is not referred to as a “bawl” and the men’s room door doesn’t say “Turlet.”

New Yorkers take their sports very seriously. I know that because my first day on the air at WNBC, I made a little hockey joke that ice for me goes in margarita’s and not as a surface for several large humans from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan to play on. This was akin to my saying, “I enjoy biting the heads off of bunnies,” to my hardcore sports fan audience. After that, I dutifully read the scores and humbly said goodnight.

After all, I was a Bay Area boy and always thought of sports as the toy shop, and win or lose there was a pretty good chance the sun would rise the next day. Not so much here in Gotham.

The erudite author Tom Wolfe once described New York sports fans by saying, “I recognize all the obnoxious stereotypes of New Yorkers: Arrogance, rudeness, impatience, and omniscience. They think they’re better than everyone else, more entitled than everyone else, and more immune to life’s inequities than everyone else — like losing a game.”

I was always taken with the assumed importance of a game. Any game, be it football, baseball, basketball, or pickleball here in New York. “Either we win or we’re selling our first born for upgraded seats. Besides which, he’ll probably like it in Buffalo.”

The New York Post, that bastion of journalistic bashing, generally calls for the head of the coach, owner, quarterback, or water boy if any of the local teams lose any game by more than a run, a goal, or point. If their team only did lose by a point, the fan’s vengeance was less. Hanging the guilty party by their thumbs for instance.

I have always been of the belief that a rather high percentage of fans who attend an NFL game have very little idea of what’s actually going on in the game. In New York that’s a fact ten-fold. New York fans inherently know that every coach is stupid, every quarterback inept, and that an opponent couldn’t possibly actually beat a New York team were it not for the fact that their squad is replete with dopes who let the other guys win by their sheer incompetence.

They know that because this city has a plethora of screaming sports talk show hosts who — it goes without saying — know more than the “morons” who coach and play for their teams. This information is transferred to the fans who listen — and suddenly you’ve got a stadium full of Stephen A. Smith’s.

I grew up in San Francisco, where dinner table conversation ranged from “Really nice piece of fish,” to “What did you learn at school today?” My dad was the only one in his family who ever dared explore the wilderness beyond Brooklyn. As a result, I wound up spending most summers watching the Dodgers with my Uncle Max (it is required that you must have an Uncle Max if you live in Brooklyn). Like most New Yorkers, Uncle Max knew everything. Well, almost everything

His knowledge didn’t extend much beyond telling me which players were Jewish. “We’ve got Duke Schneider (Snider), the Yankees have Mickey Mendell (Mantle) and he was so convinced Yogi Berra was Jewish that he and my aunt Fanny called him “Yogela.” I had to convince them that Willie Mays was not going to be coming to Passover seder.

You see, New Yorkers know stuff.

I had a great time living in New York for five years. I was young, stupid, single and didn’t even have to wait in line to get into Studio 54. But, dealing with the pomposity of New York fans was always nails on a chalkboard for me.

When I was offered an opportunity to keep my job at NBC and also be based in the Bay Area, I snatched it faster than the Road Runner runs down Wile E. Coyote. But I still carry an essence of the New York I knew.

“Yo! Da’ Niners don’t got a chance this week. But the idiot Giants will screw it up enough to let ’em win.”

Now, excuse me. I gotta go to the “turlet.”

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native.  Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.