New York Waiting for Its Next Parade
The Knicks’ 2026 playoff run has The City energized and Knicks fans excited and hopeful for the elusive championship. Me included. It has been a while, and it’s not just the Knicks.
As a Mets/Jets/Knicks/Rangers fan born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, sports fandom has been a lifetime of misery, featuring mostly failures and collapses. My teams have no titles since 1994 (pronounced “NINETEEN NINETY F-IN FOUR” for those with enhanced audio)
My team was the 1986 Mets. A team that dreams were made of at the perfect time in my life, 17. They cruised through the regular season, winning 108 games. But I should have seen the signs. They almost blew the 1986 World Series, driving me to the fetal position with two outs in the bottom of the 10th inning, down two runs in Game 6, before Mookie and Buckner, and you know the rest. Nothing in my fandom comes easy.
On January 12, 1969, two days before my one-month birthday, the Jets shocked the world and won Super Bowl III. Joe Namath and his guarantee. The reason why the NFL and AFL merged. The Jets were an important team. But that didn’t last. The NFL will play Super Bowl LXI in February 2027. That’s more than an LV since the Jets even played in a Super Bowl.
The Knicks! The current beacon of hope. They last raised the championship trophy 53 seasons ago, and last played in the NBA Finals in 1999.
And then there was 1994, an amazing time in New York sports.
In 1994, the Rangers broke their 54-year curse. The Knicks and Rangers lit up Madison Square Garden in June with runs to their respective finals. The Knicks took a 3-2 series lead, playing through the O.J. chase to win Game 5, before losing in seven games. The Rangers took a 3-1 lead in their series vs. Vancouver, then dropped two games before winning the Stanley Cup in a magical Game 7 on June 14, 1994, at the Garden.
That was 11,651 days ago. How did we get here, my fandom of non-winners?
My best guess is that during my fan-formative years, the mid-1970s, I was sucked (suckered?) in by tales of a magnificent time to be alive in New York and love sports.
First, the Jets beat the Colts in the Super Bowl in early 1969. Then the 1969 Mets came from nowhere to win 100 games and the World Series that fall. That was followed closely by a Knicks 60-win season that culminated with a Game 7 win over the Lakers in the 1970 NBA Finals (the Willis Reed Game).
Three years later, the Monroe-Frazier-DeBusschere-Bradley-Reed Knicks put together another title run, followed by the Ya Gotta Believe Mets almost stealing the 1973 World Series from the powerful Oakland A’s in the fall of that year.
All of that winning! I couldn’t wait to have my own experiences. Turns out, I could wait. Still waiting, in fact.
I became a Rangers fan by going to Madison Square Garden as a child. The Garden has well-earned nicknames like The Mecca and the World’s Most Famous Arena. It’s captivating as an adult, and a magical place for a sports-obsessed kid from Brooklyn. When I moved to Long Island in 1977, I stayed a Rangers fan instead of adopting the hometown Islanders, who played nearby in the Nassau Coliseum. I have fond (but ultimately losing) memories of intense Rangers-Islanders playoff series and middle school rivalries during the Islanders’ run of four straight Stanley Cups from 1980-1983. The last of them was a best-of-five series in 1984, which ended in a 3-2 Isles overtime win in Game 5, the most intense hockey I ever remember watching.
Let’s talk about the Yankees and their 27 championships. Our parents of the post-war “Boomer” generation lived in a world where baseball was king in New York. They watched the Yankees go to 15 of 18 World Series between 1947-64. The Dodgers went to six World Series between 1947-56. Even the baseball Giants won the World Series in 1954. That’s a lot of winning.
If your parents rooted for the baseball Giants (Manhattan) or the Dodgers (Brooklyn), their hearts were broken when both teams departed for the West Coast after 1956. They were left with only the hated Yankees for five seasons until the Lovable Mets came along in 1962 with legendary Yankees manager Casey Stengel and their 120 losses.
New York’s football teams in the 1970s were a lost cause. No playoff appearances for the Jets or Giants. You became a Giants fan because your parents told you stories of Frank Gifford and Sam Huff and the Greatest Game Ever Played (1958, they lost). Or you had season tickets passed down from parents, or you grew up in New Jersey, and suddenly, in 1976, you had a team to call your own. Or you got an LT jersey for Christmas or Hanukkah in the 80s.
The Giants won four Super Bowls in the ensuing years and, much like the Yankees, were always the Blue Bloods. Franchises dating back to the 1920s, with loyal fan bases and records of success. The Jets and the Mets were underdog stories, founded in the 1960s, that showed a few flashes of greatness amongst long periods of despair.
The nine New York-area men’s franchises haven’t won a title since the Giants won the Super Bowl in 2012 (the WNBA’s New York Liberty finally broke through in 2024 after 27 years in the league). Even the dynastic Yankees have only won one World Series since the turn of the century. For a city that enjoyed generations of championship celebrations, that’s a startling drought.
Championship coaches even tried mightily and failed to reverse my curse. After Bill Parcells won two Super Bowls with the Giants, he was anointed the Jets’ savior in 1997. By 1998, he had the Jets in the AFC Championship game, with a lead at halftime. That didn’t work out, their QB tore his Achilles in the 1999 opener, and Parcells fled the Jets like the Plague after the 1999 season due to the impending change in ownership.
Pat Riley coached the Lakers to four NBA titles in the 1980s. He joined the Knicks in 1991 but couldn’t get past Michael Jordan’s Bulls for three straight years. He took the Knicks to within one win in 1994, of course, but after they lost in the playoffs in 1995, he resigned from the Knicks via fax to coach the Miami Heat, where he won more titles as coach and president.
As Riley has often said, there’s winning, and then there’s misery. Time will tell if these 2026 Brunson-KAT-Hart-OG-Bridges Knicks can turn my misery into winning.