Life, the Knicks and Everything

Last night the New York Knicks won their first NBA Championship in 53 years. New York City, arguably (perhaps inarguably) the most famous, most influential, most singular city in the world, went 53 years without an NBA Championship. You see, while the Knicks have always been famous, they have not always been winners. 

I feel this is a good point to interject and clarify a few things. One, I am not a sports writer. Not only that, I’m not even a sports fanatic (or haven’t been until recently). I’m not a long-suffering Knicks fan who spent most of my life waiting for this moment. In fact, being born and raised in San Antonio and a sports casual at best, I was a de facto Spurs fan most of my life. Like everyone else in my city, I got swept up in Spurs fever during the 1999 finals (coincidentally – or not – against the Knicks). I admired the team then – they played solid, fundamental ball in an era where flash was king and they carried themselves with dignity and integrity. If you’d asked me before who my favorite basketball player of all time was, I’d say Tim Duncan, and I meant it. But I was always, even then, a casual fan. I moved to Austin and back and barely noticed what the Spurs did during those years. But once I was back in town, I’d get a little caught up in Spurs fever during playoff runs and then largely forget about basketball again. 

All of this is to say, if you’re looking for in depth analysis on the game, a wealth of ball knowledge or deep cut trivia, I am sorry to disappoint but I quite literally barely know ball. I played as a kid until injuries took me out in middle school, thus leading me down the path to dramatic art kid (which is basically the opposite side of the never-ending high school cafeteria of life). I watch regularly enough to understand the basic rules and plays, to get angry when I see an unjust call, to scratch my forehead when a player makes a decision I just cannot fathom. But a deep and abiding understanding and knowledge gained only by years as a diehard fan of the game? That, I have only just begun to cultivate, so you won’t find much of it here. 

But an understanding of the spirit of the game? Of that, I now have a firm grasp, and I owe that to the New York Knicks. And, I suppose, the person who introduced me to them. Or should I say, helped me truly get to know them. You see, the New York Knicks need no introduction. They are synonymous with New York City itself, and everyone knows New York City. From every corner of the world, if you’ve had even the most tenuous grasp on popular culture over the last seven decades minimum, you know what New York City is. Songs have been written and sung about it from artists as diverse as Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Jay-Z, The Ramones, The Pogues and Interpol. In Friends, the most popular sitcom of all time, The City plays a character itself, shaping the lives of the other six characters through the years. In Sex and the City, a pop culture phenomenon that helped define the late 90s/Y2K zeitgeist, The City is not only a character, it is the beating heart of the series. New York City is synonymous with art, with fashion, with journalism and business and literature and architecture. It is the picture of both the extravagances of wealth and the scarcity of poverty. It is the city of dreams and it is a city that requires grit to survive. It is a microcosm for life itself, all the complexities and beautiful polarities that life contains. To put it colloquially, New York really is That Girl. 

And this is why, despite not winning a title for 53 years, the New York Knicks have always remained one of the most iconic teams in the world. Because even if you weren’t from New York, or even from America, you knew that name, you saw that logo. Whether it was the characters in Friends wearing Knicks sweatshirts, Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones exclaiming “I don’t get laid unless the Knicks win” or everyone from The Sugarhill Gang to Jay-Z shouting them out, you have absolutely heard of the New York Knicks. Headlines about who was sitting on celebrity row for the Knicks have been seen across the world even in the team’s worst years. 

And this is why, as my fandom grew from casual to fanatical enough to be writing about sports when I have never once even considered writing about sports (unless professional wrestling counts), I was surprised to learn that it had been 53 years since the New York Knicks had won the NBA Championship. It’s why I was astounded to learn that among sports fans, being a diehard New York Knicks fan meant being the butt of a lot of jokes about your team. From my vantage point as an occasional, casual fan of the sport who lived a world away in Texas, the Knicks were simply New York, and that made them cool. For diehard Knicks fans growing up or living in New York, loving the Knicks was a matter of identity, a love born in the pride of being a New Yorker, of being bred by a city on whom the spotlight of the world never stops shining. 

And maybe that was the secret to seeing the magic in the entity that is the New York Knicks – one needed to be either far enough removed from it to see only its intrigue, or close enough to the very soul of it so that you felt its magic in your DNA no matter how many times it had broken your heart. And maybe that’s what made my journey with this team the perfect storm for starting a love affair with a basketball team that will last the rest of my life. 

It’s a tale as old as time – Texas girl meets New York boy, falls in love and life is never the same again. Well, I met him online while he was living in LA and we were long distance at first, so I guess, tale as old as 1999 when You’ve Got Mail introduced us to the idea of falling in love with someone over the internet. When you find yourself in a long distance relationship (especially for the first time ever and when it’s something you absolutely never in one million years thought you would do), you find creative ways to feel close and connected to this person you are loving from 1,341 miles away. So when his deep and abiding love for the Knicks, the team shrouded in NYC intrigue for this casual basketball watcher from Texas, I figured I’d watch a few games, like a sort of bonding experience. It was April 2024 and I had no idea I was stumbling into the early stages of something special. I just knew that the Knicks were cool, this person I loved loved them, and I really liked the way they played ball.

They played good ball. They had good chemistry, good teamwork and that Jalen Brunson guy, he played fearless but he wasn’t sloppy. He played smart, really smart. It made watching them a lot of fun. And so it was that I found myself on May 19, 2024, wearing orange and blue eye makeup and a blue shirt to visit my mother in her nursing home and my father in his hospital room before stopping at my favorite dive bar to watch the game and argue with the handful of Pacers fans perched amongst the Spurs fans. But for that day, I cheered passionately enough to make a fair number of Spurs fans casually cheer the Knicks, something that will almost certainly never happen again. 

But we all know how that day, and that playoffs series, ended. The Pacers beat the Knicks. Meanwhile I developed a lifelong disdain for the Pacers and life moved onward. In October 2024, my dad went into the hospital again. He had many times since his cancer diagnosis in May 2021, even after surgery and treatment successfully put his cancer in remission. But October 2024 was the beginning of the end. I spent the next several weeks in a cycle of visiting him in the hospital or the rehabilitation center before bringing him home and caring for him only for him to go back into the hospital again. During this time, I would visit my mother in the nursing home as well. She’d been there almost 2 years by then after a stroke in late 2022 led to vascular dementia that required around the clock care she could not get at home. Those last few months of 2024 are a blur of exhaustion. I was barely aware of anything happening in the world. Basketball just didn’t register on my radar. 

In the first week of December 2024, my father and my mother died one week apart. I spent the next several months in a blur of paperwork, funeral planning, figuring out estate laws and back taxes and what vet do I take the dog to because his old vet is too expensive now that it’s just me paying all the bills we used to share and what do I do now that my mom and dad are gone because I don’t even know how to be a grown up let alone be a grown up alone. In May 2025, I lost the home I’d shared with my parents, so I barely noticed when the Knicks lost the playoffs to the Pacers once again.

Through it all though, the one who had brought the Knicks into my world was still there. He was the first person I called the morning I lost my father, December 1st. From 1,341 miles away, he sat with me while I cried, while I asked aloud how to live in a world without my father. He sat with me on the phone on December 7th, my birthday. He was on the phone with me at 3:00am December 8 when the nursing home called me to tell me they had found my mother unresponsive in her bed and sent her to the hospital where a few hours later I would watch her take her final breath. And he was there when I found myself on a street corner in Santa Monica the day before Christmas Eve, the first moment I got to see him face to face. He stood on the beach with me Christmas Eve night while I cried and he played guitar on the pier for me to make me smile before I had to fly back home Christmas Day, and while life was not perfect, those were perfect moments. 

The Victorians used to have a designated mourning period of one year for the loss of a parent. Now I know why. I spent most of 2025 in the kind of haze only your deepest depression can conjure. I moved to a new place, I went to work, I made new friends, I went out (I even watched the games at the bar sometimes, always cheering the Knicks). I found moments of joy, a few times I cried. Sometimes I’d share stories about my parents. Mostly though, I tried to ignore the pain gnawing at the edges of my reality. I avoided looking at pictures of them. When I felt the tears rise up, I choked them back. I kept myself from fully mourning them because if I even thought about the weight of it, it threatened to choke all the life out of me and drop me where I stood. I spent a year detached from most everything except a handful of people and a few comforts like music and wrestling.

But in the early hours of December 1, 2025, something reminded me of my dad and I started to cry. And this time, instead of shutting it off and stuffing it down, I let myself cry. I let myself sob and wail about how unfair it was that my parents were gone. I let myself miss them, let the full weight of their absence fall over me. And then something beautiful happened. I felt their love, as strong and warm as ever. I felt their embrace surrounding me and I could hear their voices telling me they were with me. That was the day the lost year ended and life began again. Four days later, I flew to LA to visit my boyfriend again. On December 7, my birthday, we began the drive back to Texas together, to stay.

On December 16 as we settled in to watch the Knicks vs the Spurs for the NBA Cup, I answered a question I hadn’t even thought to ask myself before – who would I root for between the team that had sparked some magic for me before my world completely fell apart and the hometown team for whom I’d often celebrated wins? I got my answer when I immediately started cheering for the Knicks without even stopping to think. Time had passed and much had changed since that little window in May 2024, but my excitement watching the Knicks play had emerged very much intact. 

We spent Christmas Day in bed watching the Knicks beat the Cavaliers, my boyfriend wearing the Knicks socks I’d put in his stocking, the first stocking I’d hung for him to celebrate our first Christmas Day together where I didn’t have to rush off to the airport, where neither of us had to go anywhere farther away than the kitchen to grab more snacks. 

As weeks turned into months, the Knicks quietly became a regular part of my life. The game would be on while I scrolled online after work, while I made dinner in the kitchen just a few feet away or while I watched wrestling on the laptop, increasingly keeping an eye on the games. The names and numbers of players became familiar as memes caught my attention and podcasts played in the background while I worked. What it meant to be a Knicks fan was revealed to me alongside what it meant to be a New Yorker, as my boyfriend shared personal stories and Knicks lore and interesting bits of knowledge and trivia. 

And so it came to be that as the Knicks found themselves in the 2026 playoffs, I found myself increasingly invested in seeing them win it all. I watched casually but happily as they beat the Hawks. I found myself looking forward to game days as they swept the 76ers. I watched with excitement as this team that no one other than its die hard fans believed in, led by a captain doubted by critics and basketball fans alike, swept the Cleveland Cavaliers. 

And then I got ready to watch them face off against my hometown team for the NBA Championship. I knew I’d be cheering for the Knicks. After all, I was definitely solidly a Knicks fan by now. What I didn’t foresee was how easy it would be. I expected perhaps a twinge of guilt for rooting against the home team, a little tug at my heartstrings by the hometown boys perhaps.

Instead, I found that loving the Knicks had already become more ingrained in me than I’d realized. I defended them against friends and railed against what I saw as dirty gameplay by the Spurs and uneven refereeing by NBA officials. I found myself disillusioned as the respect I’d always felt for the hometown team I grew up casually cheering slipped away. I felt righteous indignation as a fan of this underdog team who was playing their fucking heart out against a stacked deck of unethical players (I’m looking at you, Wemby) and refs intent on handing wins to the other team (or at least intent on extending the series). I found myself furious watching game 3 as refs refused to call a flagrant foul on what was very fucking flagrantly a flagrant fucking foul. I rage tweeted about the most blatantly biased officiating I’d ever seen in a game. I even made the mistake of sharing my frustrations on Facebook, you know, the profile I really only have in order to keep in touch with my few remaining family members and all my hometown friends. Yeah, that ended about as well as you’d imagine. Sure it’s “just sports” but under the right (wrong?) circumstances, that type of shit will have you questioning things you never would have questioned before. Trust me, don’t open that Pandora’s box.

But something else was happening too. I was finding more than just a love for watching the Knicks play, more than just frustration at the other team and the refs. I was finding connection among other fans in online spaces, sharing memes and frustrations and hopes, reading their stories of why the Knicks meant so much to them. With tears in my eyes, I watched Karl-Anthony Towns talk openly about the pain of losing his mother and about the hope and strength in finding those signs that let him know she is still with him. His words spoke straight to my heart. I understood the pain of losing a mother (and, in my case, a father). I knew the strength it took to get through it. And thankfully, gratefully, I also know what it means to see those signs, to talk to my parents still and to know that they’re still with me. I’ve never met KAT, but I realized I felt a bond with him, the kind of bond you can only have with someone who’s lost their mom too. And so I watched in admiration while he spoke so openly about loss and grief and love. I watched with pride as he played for his mom, as he overcame obstacles. I wanted to see him win.

I had been watching as Jalen Brunson, doubted by so many, led his team to victory after victory, even when the cards were stacked against him. Now I sat rocking in excitement, anticipation, and maybe a little worry, as game 4 unfolded. As Wemby’s antics and the unfair refereeing continued. As the Spurs lead climbed to 29 points. I watched in near reverence as the Knicks never gave up, never waivered. I watched as they kept giving it everything they had, playing hard, playing smart, playing like they had no doubt in their minds that they would walk out the winner that night. And I watched, overjoyed, as they did exactly that. When OG Anunoby rebounded Brunson’s missed three and tipped the ball in with 1.2 seconds on the clock, I exploded with joy and burst into tears as the Knicks won game 4 by one glorious point.

I sat crying tears of joy as they celebrated their win and as New York celebrated with them. I watched, rapt, as my boyfriend celebrated this win and my heart swelled with so much love, I thought it might burst. I celebrated with him. I celebrated with friends who were rooting for the Knicks. I celebrated with strangers online who I now felt a connection to, the kind of connection that can only come from loving the same thing. And in this, I finally understood the appeal of it all. This thing that had been so casual to me before because, after all, it was “just sports”. It wasn’t the high art of cinema or the creative genius of a perfectly written song. It wasn’t the meeting of art and storytelling and athleticism that made me love professional wrestling so passionately. Sports were just fun. It took talent and strength, sure. It was exciting, yes. Sure, it spoke to the competitive nature of man and the desire to win. But it wasn’t anything deeper than that. Or at least, it hadn’t been, not to me, not before. 

Only now, I could see it all. I watched video after video of New Yorkers celebrating in a way I’d never really seen an entire city celebrate. I’ve seen cities celebrate wins before. I’ve been part of the celebrations myself. In San Antonio, when the Spurs win during playoffs and finals, people Go Honking. It’s a San Antonio phenomenon that began in 1999, during the Spurs playoff run when fans leaving the Alamadome and more fans coming downtown just to celebrate and enjoy the fun started honking. Going Honking has happened every year the Spurs have made the playoffs since.

But no celebration I’d ever witnessed up close or from afar hit quite the same as the one I watched through my screen after game 4. Maybe it’s because it had been 53 years since their last NBA Championship win, maybe it’s the state of the world right now, maybe it’s how unfair the series had felt, maybe it was all of those things. And maybe it’s just New York. Whatever it is, the beauty and the joy unlocked a magic I’d never felt before, even from 1,824 miles away. 

In the story of the Knicks, the resilience of New York itself could be found. Their 53 year wait for a championship that at times must have felt like it would never come couldn’t keep their spirits down or make them stop believing now. If anything, it just made their fans even more fiercely loyal, even more determined that this year was THE YEAR, that the Knicks were bringing that championship home. New York has a way of overcoming anything. Knicks fans knew their time was coming. Jalen Brunson knew their time would come, too. And so he and his team played like they knew they could win, even when others thought it wouldn’t happen. Down 29 points in game 4, Wemby thought he was in their head. Fans worried this game would end as game 3 had, in a loss for the Knicks. Some fans turned the game off early. A few even left the game early. But those who kept the faith (and even those whose faith wavered) were rewarded with the biggest comeback in NBA playoffs history and, to my mind, the most epic comeback in all of sports. Ever. All the waiting, all the faith, all the tenacity, had led to this. The Knicks were one win away. The City was so electric, you could feel it across the world. That feeling, that electricity, was hope, and in a world such as we find ourselves today, hope is one of our scarcest, most valuable resources. 

And so I found myself so excited for game 5 that I woke up earlier than I meant to on my day off and spent Saturday, June 13, 2026 reading articles and tweets, watching videos, and waiting impatiently for the game to begin. My body was in pain (that’s another story altogether) but my spirit was flying and I felt like I could run through a brick wall with all the energy pent up inside me. I knew we were winning. I KNEW IT. I knew it so completely, I did something I would never do about something I was genuinely invested in. I tweeted “We absolutely got this, Knicks winning this tonight.” That doesn’t sound like a big deal until you consider that I have long had a deeply held fear of jinxing good things that matter to me. I’ve lost a lot in my time. I mean, who hasn’t, but I’ve lost enough that it became a fear. Anything good could be taken away at a moment’s notice, so don’t get too comfortable and whatever you do, don’t get ahead of yourself. Got a new opportunity, new job, new home? Keep quiet or at most, speak very humbly about it until you know it’s really happening. Whatever you do, don’t talk about a good thing with any certainty before it happens because that is one surefire way to make sure falls apart. The loss of a good thing is punishment for being too sure.

So how and why then, when I find this thing that now means so much to me, would I dare tempt fate by proclaiming so boldly that we were winning? And why, when a friend responded that they hoped so, would I tempt fate even further by stating “Not a doubt in my mind!”? I don’t really know other than to say, I just knew. For the first time in a long, long time, I just KNEW. I felt it in my bones. This was right. This was the time. This was happening. 

I watched as my team (my team! They’re my team now and I love them, I love them, I love them) worked their magic despite those same dirty plays and unfair calls. I watched as the Spurs seemed to dominate at first and I watched and finally understood what made the Knicks work so well. There’s a joke that the Knicks start playing later in the game than their opponent. I finally saw the reality. I watched as they took their time in figuring out the lay of the land, taking into account their opponent’s plans and the way the referees were calling (or not calling) plays. And I watched as they adapted, as they didn’t just find their footing but as they became a living, breathing, well-oiled machine, curling artfully around their opponent on the floor. They played hard, they played smart, they played with grit and with integrity. They played selflessly and cohesively. They played for the greater good. They played with all the heart in the world. 

And they won. After 53 years, the team that never could, did. In the Frost Bank Center, Knicks fans who had traveled to San Antonio to support their team erupted in cheers so loud, you’d have thought for a moment they were in Madison Square Garden. In Manhattan, cheers rang throughout the city so loud, they could be heard across the Hudson River in New Jersey. In our little condo in San Antonio, we jumped to our feet. I yelled, louder than I meant to. There were tears and there was hugging as we stood, smiling, watching the Knicks celebrate this hard fought win. We stayed up watching the celebration, the interviews, videos from the streets New York. We stayed up until the wee hours watching a livestream of someone walking through Manhattan, watching revelers in the streets until dawn broke over The City. 

We watched Nike’s Knicks commercial featuring Billy Joel’s New York State of Mind (already a song I love by a singer so important to me, it probably warrants its own longwinded essay) and the tears flowed again. And there, in the celebrations, I realized at last what I’d been learning all along. The Knicks made it all click for me. The magic of it all. The beauty of the journey, the art of the gameplay, the story of humanity told through sports. I finally saw the romance of it, from the weight of the sorrows to the purity of the joys and the electrifying feeling of hope that sets your nerve endings on fire. 

As Mike Breen said just after the Knicks won, while Jalen Brunson hugged his father, “You know, life is not perfect, but there are perfect moments. And there’s one right there.” 

At the end of the day, that’s really all life is. A series of moments, one after another, bleeding into each other, weaving a story which we will often only half remember. Some moments stand out though. Sometimes for their pain. Sometimes for their laughter. And sometimes, just sometimes, for the beauty and rarity of their perfection. 

This moment will be preserved, but like all moments, the true weight of the moment will begin to fade over time to all but those who experienced it. But a moment like this changes us. It turns losers into winners. Young captains become undeniable greats. A city that once found unity in tragedy becomes the city that reminds us of the unity to be found in joy. A girl in Texas finds her heartbeat in a team from New York City. The New York boy beside her finds his lifelong wish coming true. A team reminds us that being who you are will always be the path to true greatness, even if it takes a while. And in those perfect moments, basketball reminds us to let that which we love be what defines us.