The universal righteous indignation over Ray Allen leaving Celtics green for more orange-y pastures is just … so … New England.

Let me get this straight: After Allen spent six years in Milwaukee and five in Seattle, we were expecting brand loyalty?

I’d use the term “hometown discount,” but damned if I know what the correct terminology is when you allegedly offer the guy who’s been in your camp bucket loads more money than the rival and yet he still wants out.

Money isn’t the object here, anyway. It’s jewelry. What’s so hard to understand about that? Allen is a 10-time NBA all-star and the most prolific 3-point shooter in the history of professional basketball. We’re talking a dead lock to haunt those hallowed halls in Springfield, Mass., long after our great-great-great-grandchildren are gone.

Allen has one championship ring. He wants two. And clearly, right now, if adding to the value of your nightstand or safe deposit box is all the motivation you have left, the Miami Heat are the team with the best player, the best winter weather and the best referees.

For any free agent with a shred of market value and a burning desire to pluck confetti and ticker tape off his crows-footed brow one more time, the best odds involve taking your talents to South Beach.

And the modern sports fan —   especially the one living within a three-hour radius of Boston —   considers that either noble or cowardly and enforces the standards selectively.

LeBron James’ public perception will never completely recover from his choice to spurn Cleveland, a star-crossed city that may never win a championship in any other sport, no matter how gift-wrapped an opportunity (1986 Browns? 1997 Indians? 2010 Cavaliers?) it gets.

James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh were decried for giving the impression that they manipulated the ties that now bind them. If it was not organizational collusion, by gosh, their own back-and-forth efforts to prime the pump were a moral outrage.

It’s as if Celtics fans forgot the assemblage of our own Big Three just 36 months earlier. Yes, I know Allen and Kevin Garnett were acquired in summer trades. There was no prime-time special, no pep rally, no absurd prediction of victory parades for posterity’s sake.

But text messages and speed dial did exist then, my friends. Don’t tell me Garnett and Allen weren’t pulling the strings. Don’t tell me there was no star privilege involved in both of them coming to town in exchange for a few rolls of tape and some cans of athlete’s foot spray.

Expecting both of them to retire with us (I’d say “grow old,” but they’re already there) is more than foolhardy. It‘s like expecting the person who left his or her spouse for you to stick around if they get a more enticing offer.

The same phenomenon prevails with the Red Sox, where Carl Crawford and John Lackey’s choices to depart perennial bridesmaid organizations for our fair community would be celebrated if either of them had embraced us, or the enormous pressure, and actually performed. Yet the reception for Johnny Damon and Roger Clemens — years after they departed the scene of the perceived crime — is measured with polite applause rather than a decibel meter.

Yeah, you say, but they went to the Yankees. Yeah, but Curtis Martin went to the Jets. Yeah, but Ray Allen went to the Heat.

Yeah but nothing. No unwritten rules exist here. Believing otherwise is class envy at best and institutional racism at worst.

No matter how excessive our passion for our sports teams and no matter how hefty the checks athletes cash, they live in the same America that gives them the same right to seek what’s best for them as we cherish.

Ray Allen doesn’t owe you or me anything. He’s an over-the-hill role player who decided that the opportunity to hitch a ride with the reigning world champions was too good to pass up.

He has the vision and the detachment that most of us fans don’t. He’s smart enough to recognize that the gap between the Heat and the Celtics is far greater than a down-to-the-wire Eastern Conference championship series made it appear.

And frankly, it doesn’t take an insider to figure out that a) James, Wade and Bosh are only going to get better together; and b) the NBA is a star-driven league in which that franchise will continue to get the benefit all striped and suit-wearing doubt.

Allen gave you five splendid seasons, the final productive chapter in a Hall of Fame career. He helped bring you a championship after a 22-year famine and ushered you to the cusp of two others.

Let him go gracefully.

Kalle Oakes is a staff columnist. His email is [email protected].