If you’re a fan of the New Orleans Pelicans, you should pay attention to these NBA Finals even if many basketball fans will ignore it.

This someday could be your Pelicans playing for the Larry O’Brien trophy.

Yeah, I know that’s hard to fathom when the team you cheer for has made it to the second round of the playoffs just twice since pro hoops returned to New Orleans in 2002.

It’s even harder to imagine when you’re a small-market team often overshadowed by those headline-grabbing media darlings in places such as Los Angeles, New York or Boston.

But this year’s NBA Finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Indiana Pacers should give you a little hope.

It’s a rare all-small-market Finals matchup that hasn’t been seen in more than five decades. You’d have to go all the way back to 1971 when the Milwaukee Bucks played the Baltimore Bullets to find an NBA Finals where neither team was from a city in a top-20 TV market.

Viewer ratings of this series almost certainly will be low. But you can expect the level of play to be high between two teams that three years ago were as bad as the Pelicans were this season. (My prediction, by the way, is OKC in five games.)

One June, perhaps an NBA Finals will be played in the Smoothie King Center.

That’s the goal for Joe Dumars, hired in April as the Pelicans executive vice president of basketball operation.

“The teams you see in the Finals now, that was a process,” Dumars said. “None of that was overnight. That was a process.”

Indeed it was.

Three short seasons ago, the Thunder won just 24 games. The Indiana Pacers didn’t do much better that season, winning 25 games.

Three years later, they are both four wins away from an NBA title.

Credit the executives of the Pacers and Thunder for their ability to quickly flip their rosters and put the right pieces in place.

They did it with quality coaches. They did it through the draft. They did it via trades. And they did it by signing talented players in free agency despite playing in small markets.

Dumars doesn’t plan to let building a roster in one of the NBA’s smallest markets stop him, either.

“In all my years in the NBA, I’ve never really tried to make a distinction between small market and big market,” Dumars said. “Here’s why: It truly is about the environment and culture you build in your city and in your building. It really doesn’t matter where you play. There are some big cities where the culture has been bad and guys don’t want to play there. And there are small markets where the culture is incredible and guys want to play there.”

So for Dumars, the first step is building the culture. He plans to do that with Zion Williamson as the cornerstone.

“It’s really about what you build that’s going to attract people,” Dumars said. “You have to build something that players want to come to, irrespective of what city you’re in.”

So how does Dumars plan to do that in New Orleans?

“By doing things first class,” he said. “Taking care of the players. Taking care of their families. The way you do business. The way you travel. Everything. People have to feel good about coming into the building.

“That’s what culture is. You want players to say, ‘I want to go and play there because I heard they treat you great.’ When you win and they treat you great, those are the things that attract guys.”

Can it happen in a city like New Orleans?

These NBA Finals at least give the faithful some hope.