Finally, the Knicks Are NBA Champions
The Knicks are NBA Champions. I continue to roll that sentence over in my head. Almost 48 hours later it’s still hard to come to terms with. It’s the first chip that will be remembered for multiple generations of Knicks fans.
It’s surreal to listen to Knicks talk and hear NBA Champions repeated over and over. Full podcasts normally dedicated to Celtics talk or NFL futures are gushing about the Knicks this week. How they were wrong about Jalen Brunson. Almost everyone was, except Leon Rose (time to give Becky Hammon a pass. She wasn’t alone). How Leon was right about a lot of things: trading Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for KAT; all those first round picks for Mikal Bridges; replacing Thibs with Mike Brown.
Giddiness. Relief. Pride.
The moments after the Knicks sealed the win, I flashed back to Saturday, November 1, 1986, my freshman year in college. A week earlier, the Boston Red Sox were a strike away from winning the World Series, so close to erasing a curse that had endured to that point for 68 years. That was Game 6. Mookie hits a ground ball, trickling, trickling, it’s a fair ball, it gets by Buckner, Knight scores, and the Mets win! Two days later, the Mets won the World Series. At 17, the Mets were my first team to win a championship. With the Mets stacked and the Jets starting that season 6-1, perhaps my teams were on the front edge of a golden age.
Back to Saturday morning. I was hitching a ride with Lehigh University Sports Information Director (SID) Roger Clow from Bethlehem, PA to Towson, MD for Lehigh’s football game at Towson. I was in my first semester of working for Roger in the SID office, discovering that you could watch sports and get paid at the same time.
Roger was 30 years old, a Massachusetts guy, a big Sox fan. I was 17, so Roger might as well have been 60. I was also hung over from Halloween the night before, and riding a week of Mets euphoria. We were going to spend the next two and a half hours in the car. Awkward.
Early in the ride, the conversation turned to baseball and Game 6. I’m not sure how I handled it, but Roger’s words burned in my brain. “It’s been 68 years. People have lived full lives and died and never saw the Red Sox win a World Series. I hope they win one soon.” “Boy, that sucks,” is probably what I thought. I remember thinking about Roger in 2004, when the Red Sox finally got to the top of the mountain after 86 years.
And I thought about him again Saturday night. I also thought about my dad. Not because he was a Knicks fan. Baseball was his sport. He was a Willie Mays guy, and he was 12 when they won it all in 1954. He always had a soft spot for the baseball Giants, even after they moved west. Never the Yankees. He was a National League fan and he adopted the Mets when they were born in 1962. He enjoyed the Miracle Mets in 1969 between diaper changes and feedings - I was almost 10 months old. Neither the Mets nor the Giants ever won again before he passed away in 2009. His Giants, though, won the World Series in 2010, reducing me to tears.
No crying over the Knicks. Not yet anyway. This roller coaster ride they’ve taken us on has one more emotional high on Thursday with the parade through the Canyon of Heroes. My advice to fans is to soak up every minute. You never know when this will happen again.
The giddiness first presented itself full throttle after Game 4. I thought about turning it off, and I certainly can’t blame anyone who did. From the first minute when two quick fouls were called on KAT, the deck felt stacked against them. I stayed, and like the crowd that came alive with every defiant three-pointer to cut into that lead, bit by bit, I started to wonder. And when OG blocked, and OG tipped, and Castle fumbled, the miracle comeback was complete. All I could do was laugh. My teenage son thought I was nuts. I was cackling. And I didn’t stop for a while. The Knicks came from 29 points down? In the second half?
The cackling manifested itself because these things don’t happen to my teams. The Mets? Sure, there was the 2024 Alonso home run against Devin Williams in Milwaukee in the Wildcard Series that propelled them to an almost World Series run. Almost. And now Alonso is an Oriole and Williams is a Met. Make that make sense.
The Rangers? They’ve been close. I remember introducing my son to “The King” during the 2015 Stanley Cup Final. Another almost, and now the King has hung up his crown and sits courtside watching the Knicks. The Rangers are rebuilding. Again.
The Jets? 2026 will be season 58 for the Jets in trying to get back to the Super Bowl. I know that number because I will turn 58 during the 2026 season. Only people of retirement age can tell the story of Joe Namath and Super Bowl III from memory.
“People have lived full lives and died and never saw …” Roger’s words I first heard at 17 ring in my head, this time they hit hard at 57.
But that’s tomorrow’s challenge. Let’s enjoy this one.