It’s No Dream: These Kids Are NBA All-Stars : Pro basketball: With retirements, injuries and age, it’s a changing of the guard (and forward and center).

Where’s Larry?

Where’s Magic?

Where’s Mike?

“It seems strange because I’m still looking for those guys,” said Clyde Drexler, 31 and by grace of the voters an All-Star once more.

“I’m so used to seeing them around, you kind of look for them in the hallway on your floor. But I haven’t seen them.”

Nor is he likely to. Bird is scouting, Johnson is touring, Jordan is taking batting practice. Charles Barkley is promising to retire. The old guard is changing so quickly, it will have to charter a bus.

There will be more starters in today’s All-Star game from Dream Team II than from the original. Chris Mullin, 30 and returning shakily from a long layoff, didn’t make it. Drexler, a shadow of what he was two years ago, got a courtesy appointment from the fans. Isiah Thomas, 32, didn’t.

Shaquille O’Neal once more outpolled Patrick Ewing to start at center for the East. A year ago, Ewing bristled at the news, but he seems to have learned to accept it. This is fortunate, since Patrick, the sphinx, will go off as a longshot for the rest of his career against Shaq, star of stage, screen and what have you.

Alonzo Mourning got the spot once reserved for Brad Daugherty before bowing out with an injury. Thomas’ string of 12 consecutive selections was snapped. In place of Mullin is Golden State teammate Latrell Sprewell, 23, a monster talent who will be hard to deny. Waiting in the wings are two more super rookies, Chris Webber and Anfernee Hardaway.

“We’re a young, good group, a lot of raw talent,” said Derrick Coleman, New Jersey’s $69 Million Won’t Get It Man.

“We want to step up and accept the challenge of, quote unquote, taking over the league, the next generation or whatever. I think we have a lot of guys with a lot of talent that are willing to accept that.”

Once, All-Star games lacked sub-plots, but that was before rookies with $50-million contracts.

“I’m well aware of one thing,” said Karl Malone, 30. “When time comes calling, you say to yourself, ‘I had a good time while it lasted.’ And I’m not one of the those guys that look back and say to myself, ‘God, why couldn’t I have been five years later?’ I’m happy with the years I came in because the NBA’s been great to me.

“I can remember when I came out of college, the forward then was Maurice Lucas. He was like the guy . Whenever you played him, you sort of said to yourself, ‘God, that’s the older guy. Hopefully, I’m the newer guy.’

“Every time you go out and play someone, they’ve got a young forward. If I have a great game, ‘He’s supposed to.’ But if that young player has a great game, ‘Changing of the guard. This guy’s getting old.’

“One thing that frustrates you as an older player, I realize how good it’s been for me, and you just hope that we don’t spoil it. Meaning that you come in this league and prove yourself before you get the big contracts. To me, if anything can ruin the NBA, that will, the money part of it.”

A veteran can stand only so much. Malone once told a reporter to check out the four games in which he and Coleman had gone head to head.

Coleman had missed two with injuries, and totaled 30 points in the other two.

Time is on Coleman’s side, however, and on O’Neal’s, Mourning’s, et al.

Weird it may be, when All-Star weekend doesn’t have Magic and Bird talking trash, or any reports that Jordan played 36 holes of golf before the game, but it’s happening. Everyone, young and old, will have to deal with it.