For a few weeks now, strange things have been happening in New York City.
Eye contact on the train is intentional, warm, knowing. Terriers in team sweaters sniff terriers without team sweaters suspiciously, triple-checking their loyalties.
Drivers honk with joy and not rage (sometimes), as if flagging down old friends on some Rockwellian Main Street, shouting through open windows at sidewalk splotches of orange and blue — the least melodic performance on Broadway, and the likeliest to move grown men to tears anyway:
“KNIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICKSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!”
Strange things are happening in New York City because strange things happen to New York City when the Knicks are good.
For decades, it has been easy to forget this, seeing as the Knicks have been mostly not good — so consistently and convincingly lifeless that perma-despair seemed utterly normal.
And because it has been so long since the Knicks were this good at the city’s game — 27 years since they last made the N.B.A. finals, 32 since they had an honest chance to win it all, 53 since they actually did so — generations of basketball fans are learning and relearning core truths about themselves and their electric, maddening, merrily hypocritical, suddenly-less-cynical home.
When the Knicks are good, the city shrinks, deliriously, into the biggest small town in the world — if small towns had to outlaw watch parties outside their own team’s arena because the police feared the consequences of high-density delirium.
When the Knicks are good, signs go up in the windows of the good bodegas and the bad bodegas and the cannabis shops and the eight-figure luxury apartments guarded by doormen now convening discussion sessions about Karl-Anthony Towns whenever anyone enters the lobby.
When the Knicks are good, it is right and appropriate and cringe-less to cluster outside Brooklyn bars singing “New York, New York,” an earnest anthem for emotionally vulnerable times; to know that Walt Frazier, the octogenarian star of the last title team, is still the most stylish man in these streets; to arrange for the family vehicle to be serviced at John Starks Kia in Queens, named for the beloved 1990s not-quite-hero from the last time New York cared so much about all this.
When the Knicks are good, the city’s flimsiest tropes crumble under scrutiny.
New York is meant to be unflappable, implacable, above it all. This New York is flapped, highly placable, above nothing — with the notable exception of every team the Knicks have played for a month and a half.
“They’re going to need the National Guard!” a man hollered, almost aspirationally, the night they made the finals, edging toward Madison Square Garden to join the Midtown masses in a spirit of light misdemeanor, walking among lampposts that probably should have been greased to discourage exuberant climbers.
The cheapest resale tickets for the next game in that building would soon be available for the preposterous, plausible price of more than $3,000 apiece.
Of course, New York has many teams in many sports that stir many unruly passions. Fans of Rangers hockey are avowed lunatics, but have a smaller footprint in a city where a public park’s netless hoop is something of an unofficial municipal logo. Baseball and football allegiances are split — Mets and Yankees, Jets and Giants — preventing even the most charmed playoff run from becoming a wholly unifying moment.
There is also, witnesses insist, another N.B.A. team that plays in Brooklyn, in the same arena where the Liberty won a W.N.B.A. title two years ago. But most New Yorkers have collectively agreed not to talk about the Nets, whose home games against their Manhattan rivals are generally more hospitable to — you know.
“Knicks fans,” Landry Shamet, the backup guard who has seemed to make every shot since April, said on TV after the conference-clinching win, “are a specific species of human that should be studied.”
He had been conducting his own research that night in Cleveland, where thousands of invading specimens made the road arena sound like a Seventh Avenue fever dream, where Spike Lee and Timothée Chalamet probably hurt their Q Scores in Ohio by celebrating on another Knicks opponent’s home floor.
This has been an odd wrinkle of these playoffs: a fan base that is short on recent postseason memories worth savoring and long, in some cases, on disposable income for last-minute tickets and travel. Just as New York is behaving perhaps a little more like anywhere else, submitting to a local pride befitting an apocryphal high-school football town, its ambassadors are making anywhere else sound a little more like New York, to the extent that New Yorkers ever acknowledged those dots on the map in the first place.
“NEW YORK IS THE ONLY CITY IN THE WORLD,” Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn councilman, posted on X after the win in Cleveland.
On Wednesday, the finals will start. The Knicks have done so much winning lately, so persuasively, that they have given their fans something even more disorienting than victory: sumptuous off-days, leaving the surviving contenders to maul each other in some other city for the privilege of playing against this one, against this desperate history, in front of these maniacs.
Against its better judgment, New York is ready to wonder, ready to get hurt again.
And it is ready, so unspeakably ready, for something far stranger than that.
