PATERSON – It was different four years ago.

In exile in Toms River, kind of like Napoleon in Elba, Jose “Joey” Torres was coming back into politics in 2014 and he had a grudge to settle.

He didn’t like Andre Sayegh very much, the ambitious 6th Ward councilman who had jumped into the 2010 citywide election, fractured the vote, and helped Jeff Jones displace Torres.

Now Torres was going to have a chance to put Sayegh in his place.

“You’d better be careful,” he once told the ebullient Sayegh. “Sometimes when you think people are laughing with you, they’re actually laughing at you.”

The kid rankled him.

“Do you have a race over there in Paterson?” Union City Mayor Brian P. Stack asked him eight years ago as a visibly disorganized challenging At-Large Councilman Jeff Jones kicked off his election in a roomful of about 50 people.

“Token opposition,” Torres, sitting on top of a $1 million war chest, told Stack.

Stack did a double take.

The last time he had heard a challenge described as “token opposition” was when he did a late 2008 gut check with Perth Amboy Mayor Joe Vas, who sized up challenger Wilda Diaz as a bug on the windshield proposition.

Then Diaz went and flattened Vas.

That mental note in his head as he casually watched the election results from afar, Stack watched Jones take down Torres in the upset of the year.

Torres blamed Sayegh.

He left the city on a job offer secured for him by Ocean County GOP Chairman George Gilmore.

He watched the city skid, Jones stung by a city council resistant to his agenda and Sayegh re-emergent as the perpetually Rising Star. When he reentered the bloodstream ahead of the 2014 contest, Torres did so eager for that opportunity to stretch Sayegh on the canvas.

It looked like Sayegh’s time, at least according to Sayegh’s allies.

The Passaic County Democratic Party never looked better.

Former Mayor Bill Pascrell had defeated Steve Rothman in the CD9 2012 Democratic Primary on the strength of Paterson’s plurality. Rothman’s suburbs slept while Pascrell spiked turnout in his hometown. Passaic County Democratic Committee Chairman John Currie was in on the game, too, his catapulting to state party chairman the consequence, in part, of his work with Pascrell to defeat Rothman. .

Now Pascrell and Currie were with Sayegh, who looked a little like a younger version of the electrified Pascrell. Sayegh had worked in Pascrell’s office, and learned from the congressman – among other things – that incredible retail political lesson: never leave a hand untouched or a back in-slapped.

Currie and Pascrell were going to help Sayegh get elected mayor.

They didn’t much like Torres.

And they had never been stronger.

Joey was no longer in the club.

Sayegh was hip.

And some of the guys the former mayor was hauling back into the fold likewise carried political histories with them irritating to one or the other or both. Former Sheriff Jerry Speziale – who left on awful terms with Currie – was issuing his endorsement of Torres from Alabama, of all places.

But Torres had the war paint on.

And demographics on his side.

Sayegh was half Lebanese Catholic and Syrian.

Too complicated for Paterson, said Team Torres.

Latino or bust.

Endorsements and the county party-connected money flowed in for Sayegh, who ran a strong campaign in a strangely animated field. Incumbent Mayor Jones appeared to be dead on arrival. Former Ward 2 Councilman Aslon Goow was running a law and order campaign and – possibly – taking some Muslim votes away from Sayegh.

With Jones all but potholed out of contention, Sayegh had to connect with African American voters – and fast – if he wanted to win.

Currie hit the phones for him.

Assemblyman Benjie Wimberly (D-35), who had effectively elected Jones as a council candidate in 2010, backed Sayegh, too. A high school football coach with a gruff demeanor come game time, Wimberly hated hearing the old racially-centered arguments against Sayegh’s candidacy. “I don’t care if an alien transvestite with a green Mohawk is mayor, as long as  he gets the job done,” griped the assemblyman.

But Sayegh, who served a ward that was largely Dominican and Palestinian, Lebanese and some old Italians, didn’t have deep ties into the Black wards. He was relentlessly pounding on doors in wards 3 and 4 but often meeting people for the first time.

Torres drilled into his Latino base in a Latino city and ultimately won with around 8,069 votes, savoring the payback of reducing Sayegh to a heartbreaking 6,516-vote second place finish, and in the process denting the Currie and Pascrell-led establishment, which had tried to endorse Sayegh on the steps of City Hall amid an infamous hail of bullhorned jeers from Torres allies.

Sayegh had campaigned so hard against Torres, he looked like he dropped 30 pounds in the process and put his health in jeopardy. If Robert DeNiro packed on weight to play Al Capone in The Untouchables, Sayegh looked like a withered up, unrecognizably old man version of his 30-something-year old self at the finish line.

He was stunned.

The councilman had thought he was going to win.

Did he even want to do this anymore?

Then Torres imploded.

Jammed up in a scheme to get city employees to work for him on the public dime, the mayor ate corruption charges last year after stumbling through the early months of his third regime in lame duck territory, with the threat of the DPW case hanging over City Hall, and almost the entire council, including a 2016 ward election-reinvigorated Sayegh, running against him.

Now he’s gone at last: the man who beat the late Marty Barnes, the city’s first Black mayor, himself jammed up, and Paterson again twisting politically.

Sayegh was out of the gate early as a candidate.

Ward 3 Councilman Bill McKoy is also running, and so is Ward 1 Councilman Mike Jackson.

The big question this time, given the way Torres was able to coalesce the Latino vote four years ago, is whether one of the Latinos – At-Large Councilman Alex Mendez, former Deputy Mayor Pedro Rodriguez, or PBA Prez Alex Cruz – can build on the natural demographic advantages that Hispanics have in Paterson to checkmate Sayegh’s third run for mayor.

Can one of them turn into that transcendent Torres-type figure?

The city’s top vote-getter in 2014, Mendez looks like the natural person to do it, but he has raised no money and a story yesterday about bounced checks hardly creates the impression of financial wizard. Rodriguez would need a total meltdown by Mendez, say sources, in order to take up the slack and be the guy who inherits the disaffected Torres base, and Cruz has struggled to date with residency issues.

“Rodriguez and Mendez needed to have gotten on the same page,” a source told InsiderNJ. “Pedro should have run Alex’s campaign and taken the business administrator’s job.”

As it is, the charismatic Mendez is trying to turn lack of money into his greatest, people-power strength.

Humbled by the way they got punished on the ground last time and trusting, apparently, in the way the citywide map cuts up with this particular field of candidates competing, Currie and Pascrell have been more subdued this year in their support for Sayegh, who has more money than his rivals, in addition to some of the old excitability that has been his hallmark ever since he first took the retiring Tom Rooney’s council seat back in 2008.

With nemesis Torres out of the way, “Andre’s open in the endzone,” a source told InsiderNJ. “He just has to catch the ball,” but the cycle is much quieter than four years ago, and not yet fully activated.

It’s volatile.