The closest comparison I can offer is that this feels like I got kissed. When I was a kid who wanted to kiss someone, the few occasions in which I actually got to kiss that person represented a conversion from dream to fact. To want overwhelms the senses. It’s busy, it’s feverish, it’s puzzling, it clouds the vision and rings in the ears. And then one gets what one wants and everything goes quiet. I don’t have to wonder anymore what it might feel like, because it feels like this. It’s a fact about me now, and no one can take it away from me: I’m the kid who kissed Jalen Brunson. I don’t think it’s appropriate to name an actual person I’ve kissed, so I picked the name “Jalen Brunson” at random. I guess I just made it up.
This is now a fact about me. It’s a fact about Jalen and Karl and Mike Brown, of course, but it’s also a fact about me, because the Knicks are a fact about me. I have nothing but love in my heart for adults who chose to pick up Knicks fandom recently, maybe even just for the playoff run, but right now I’m speaking to the sickos and the idiots, because I am one of you, and because the Knicks aren’t something we picked up.
The Knicks imprinted on us long enough ago that choice played no part and putting them down was never an option. If you’re reading this as a lifelong fan of a team other than the Knicks, and that team hasn’t won a title in your life, then this is for you, too. Eat shit, Knicks only, Knicks number one basketball team fuck you, etc., but this is for you.
One way you prove this fact about yourself is to name guys; to just rattle off the grimy, warty players who populated all those bad Knicks teams of yore. I could shout down at you from a tower of miserable lived experience, but I’m not here to do that. I’m not here to talk about Mirsad Turkcan or Erick Strickland to make some point about myself. I love naming guys, but I’m not gonna waste your time naming “Kelvin Cato” and “Demetris Nichols” and “Courtney Sims” and “Cheikh Samb.” Not even Xavier Rathan-Mayes. Okay? It wouldn’t be fair or productive to make you sit through such names as John Thomas and Kadeem Allen.
I trust that you’ll just take me at my word — without my having to mention Derrick Brown – that I’ve been alive for roughly 37 years and a Knicks fan for roughly 32 of them. Nearly as long as I remember being, I remember being a Knicks fan. The people who know and remember me know and remember this, too. I got a lot of texts over the weekend from people I haven’t seen in decades. I watched Game 5 with a friend I made in 1994, still one of my very best friends, one of the people who introduced me to Knicks fandom. We have this trait in common.
It’s a trait! That’s what it is. Everyone around me has always known that the Knicks run in our blood like a trait. We cannot change that. And now we don’t want to! I don’t think I’ll ever want to ever again!
That whole time, I held out hope that the Knicks would one day win an NBA championship, and all the time I spent wondering and wanting and watching such players as Slavko Vranes and Randolph Morris and, for instance, Sergio Rodriguez would make the culmination that much better. Well guess what, you motherfuckers: It did! It feels so much better this way! That tower of grime now has a Larry O’Brien trophy sitting atop it! Any future grime will slide off the big ol’ shiny ball and fall to the sides! The trophy will always sit on top!
And it’s up so, so high! It’s a huge tower! But now it can’t get any taller! Only wider? The tower metaphor got away from me! The point is: this trophy represents an incontrovertible fact about Mikal Bridges AND me AND perhaps you. Nobody can take it back.
To an extent, that would have been the case no matter how the Knicks finished the series. I spent a good chunk of Wednesday night – approximately 10:41 to 11:35 PM – trying to convince myself of that, but I really do believe it. When the Knicks fell down 29 or whatever in the first half of Game 4, I went home. I live in the Hudson Valley, but I was watching the game in downtown Manhattan. I decided to bail on the bar and my friends and just catch an earlier train home.
Along the way, I thought about two things: One was that no matter what happened in the second half, I would not watch any more of the game live. It was a vow against temptation, and I kept it. I did not take out my phone on MetroNorth except to find louder and louder music to distract myself. Experiencing that comeback only through the screams of strangers and the shaking of a train car was fucking awesome, for real.
The second thing I told myself while staring down a certain 2-2 series score was this: When the Knicks blew their lead and lost the Finals, we would still have something to hold. We still love Patrick Ewing. He still gets to hand Jalen Brunson his ECF MVP trophy. I still watch Allan Houston’s game-winner against the Heat. It’s all fond, tinged though the nostalgia may be with impending doom. A 2026 Knicks Finals run would have settled into that nostalgia portfolio no matter how it ended. Jalen Brunson would be our guy anyway. Forever. I swear I believe that.
But now . . . who gives a shit!? It’s not a Finals run, it’s a title run! No doom impends! They won. It’s a fact. It’s a fact engraved in gold, a fact to be encrusted in jewels and embroidered on . . . I dunno, what do they make those banners out of? Probably polyester. Do they wash those? It’s a fact, not a dream. It’s a kiss on the mouth. Facts don’t rattle around your head raising questions and stirring worries. Facts just sit there on a shelf, frozen. You can pick one up whenever you want. When times are tough, when you feel discouraged or lonely, or just when it’s quiet, when there’s snow on the ground, you have that fact to mind-fondle:
The Knicks are NBA champions. They’re our NBA champions. That runs in our blood now. Forever. We’ll bleed again, but we won’t bleed out.
