Let me take you into my world in 1999. We thought the computers would take over then too. I thought I was in love with T. I also thought I was in love with L. E thought she was in love with me. Or, at least, someone kept calling my landline, palm over receiver, hanging up.

None of us loved each other like I loved the Knicks. Teenage love can’t stack up to fan heartbreak. My mother’s Canarsie bedroom was my secret haven with a mirrored wall-length closet and plush green wall-to-wall carpet. I hated the Spurs and we were facing them in the Finals via one-handed phenom Latrell Sprewell, Light-Skin-Always-In Allan Houston, and spindly-armed Marcus Camby. Larry Johnson was also on the tail end of his very decent career, and had been imported to get New York one step closer. He’d done just that.

Patrick Ewing, our Caribbean hero of the 80s and 90s, had run out of gas, and sat on the bench like a rusty tow truck on a country road.

There are no long odds when you’re young. The world unfolds like a series of wins, like my hands up T’s skirt on the L train, her grinning and breathing different. Like the doughy aroma of 6 a.m. Avenue L bagels.

Catching the bus by the straps of my backpack caught in the door. I didn’t know how to mourn yet. How disappointment sat in the lower intestine waiting to drag me to the sewer. I knew sadness through the Knicks and being Black and young and overlooked. But these were vague emotions, the kinds I recorded in the little raps stuffed in my math notebook. I knew sadness like I knew ghosts who kept me awake. They had no texture, only a chilly presence in rooms I needed to escape.

The night the Knicks won their only Finals game, I was hanging out with my mother in her beautiful boudoir, sitting on the floor. She had laid on the bed in her curlers and bonnet, invested but not as knowledgeable once Ewing, the Jamaican, had faded into his sunset. I have to look at the box scores to remember all of it, but the expansive letdown started that evening as a kernel of light in my chest and kept widening until it poured out of my ears.

They barely held on to scratch out the win. No Knick shot well. I felt stymied, like I’d been tricked into believing something unlikely and cruel. As Michael Jordan’s career had ended, I thought, “We’re up next, obviously” not realizing ‘next’ could mean ‘never.’

Then Tim Duncan entered the picture. Then LeBron James. Steph Curry. A lot of stars were better than the Knicks, and shined brighter lights. They were also giants who shunned playing for a team that had more commercial wins outside of Madison Square Garden than in it.

That didn’t stop them from celebrating on our logos, stomping out our dreams. Duncan and company grabbed their first title in New York, and it’s like the basketball world left the Orange and Blue behind while each great went to the dance. Curry lit up 7th Avenue with 54 points in his debutante performance. LeBron James and Kobe Bryant bested each other’s 50-point outpourings during the same dismal season.

We sunk to the lowest rung of sports fandom: watching home games to witness other players.

A certain forlornness can be excused when you live in a walkable city, webbed with taxi stands and bikeways, local and express trains. The Big Apple’s protective of both your anonymity and your simultaneous, constant need for attachment and noise.

No worry.

Sirens will always drown out the quiet of your soul’s saddest depths.

Then, there was the night. That night. With the greatest comeback in basketball history. The greatest comeback of my life, too, though.

Life ain’t been no crystal stair for New Yorkers, for Knicks, for me. A couple days after the president dragged his demonic sludge through the place, some magic happened.

There are those who’ll tell you magic doesn’t exist. They’ll scoff at your altars and demolish your prayers. They’ll call your hope foolishness and their cynicism wisdom.

It’s the opposite. You have to reach the far edge of life, cliffhanging, roiling in apathy and sorrow to realize that faith is the only deliverance.

The Knickerbockers delivered an entire city, bred and masted at the maw of hell, to a single ecstatic reality: no hope is too silly. No dream will flourish unwritten. With 12 minute stretches of basketball, a game where the turns of a literal sphere dictate your pulse, the New York Knicks purged an entire city’s trauma.

Your world can exist in a bounce.

Then they won the championship. I was with my boys, from post-college, from the smoke-filled rooms, from the days where some left their dreams hanging just as thick as the weed in the air. We hugged and we cried and we FaceTimed. One of my best friends has two sons who now love basketball because they watch their dad break down the game and all the life to be learned from it. The thought alone tightens my rib cage around my swelling heart and produces the flood.

This year’s been really hard. My father died and — because of our difficult relationship— I refused to ID his body. The brutal mist of funeral home formaldehyde almost sucked my pupils out of their sockets as I signed his death certificate. Then I was laid off from my job for no reason. I had to accept my reality, but not lose my spirit in the agonies of a professional game.

I wrote. I wept. I exercised. In private.

But sometimes neither life nor fantasy is enough. My love for the Knicks occupies that indefinable space between improbable imaginary wins and heavy, cold stuck-ness.

Take, for example, their contradictions:

They’re run by a famously stingy, out-of-touch owner, James Dolan, but led by a star who took an enormous, unheard of pay cut to enlist his college bros to play with him.

They preside over the “World’s Most Famous Arena” but have long struggled to bring glory to it.

Their team is staffed by 8-figure millionaires, none of them classic “stars” — more like redemption stories, grinders, and hardheads who have few individual pro awards but plenty proof of their commitment to each other.

Knick fans — and this must be said — are almost exactly like New York itself: a group of transplants, recent arrivals, and dreamers contending against a league of old diehards, long rooted residents, and tastemakers. Miami financiers and Brooklyn plumbers. Astoria graphic designers and Long Island realtors. Only abiding by the paper chase.

Yet we manage to get along in the spirit of never quitting before the finish.

We have seen the valleys, trust. Karl-Anthony Towns is a befuddling and dazzling player. Prone to foul trouble and mental absences, he stirs the ire of crazies and critics alike. At one point during this epic season, he seemed pouty, dissatisfied with his role and terrified to be traded. That seemed to coincide with his engagement to a socialite and Kardashian familiar, Jordyn Woods. When the Knicks could’ve been hitting their stride, both he and the fanbase worried about the Towns tenure. He would be just another in the litany of stars who jumped on the wagon past their prime, carrying away with him more hope refuse. Amaré Stoudemire Lite.

Mikal Bridges also seemed degraded to pure fossil fuel, unable to convert his usual shorthand flick shot against Atlanta in first round. The fans banished him to Governor’s Island despite his penchant for late-game heroics. He’d turned from stud to dud when the playoffs came. John Starks Redux.

Before he was 2026 Finals MVP Jalen Brunson, he was tunnel-vision Brunson in my living room and others. “He can’t keep trying to shoot over everyone.” “Why does Jalen force the action so much when he can’t beat the D?” “That’s not the shot we want!” The very qualities we watched in awe became the bad luck omen we’d feared. A star-less franchise, we couldn’t afford another MacBeth-like arc. A Carmelo Anthony Incarnate.

Forget rewriting legacies. The team who entered the 2026 Playoffs looked like another reference stub for the endless index of futile years past. Hash marks on an old slab. The drudgery of real life where imaginary wins are all most of us get.

That’s how I entered my friend Shak’s place, after a Lyft Citibike ride from Greenpoint to Bed Stuy, and heavy with dread that this would be the loss that turned the series bleak. My basketball cohort has grayed so we don’t run threes in the parks anymore. Bad knees and separate lives. Things change in an instant.

So then how do we rewrite love? A reunion on championship night.

His wife, C, let us in on a spell she’d cast the other night, during the Big Comeback.

“Whatever you want to happen, just say it to the T.V. I promise this works.”

I tried it. “Jalen’s gonna get 44, 45 tonight.”

“Mitch got that rebound! Yea, let’s go Mitch!” And we forgave the players their flaws, that they flop against talented foes. We zeroed in on the Spurs pups, non-shooting bursts of vigor.

“He’s gonna miss that free throw.”

“Let him shoot that, that’s what we want.”

The tidal wave of New York magic started to lift our guys and sink theirs. Instead of preparing for the restless aches of more loss, we froze in consensus joy.

We were about to do it. As the buzzer sounded, the spell’s final chant came.

“We did it! I can’t believe we did it!”

Had we really done it?

Yes.

It’s true they had practiced, lived for the game, moved coasts and roles as athletes. But it was in order to leave the worrying, wishing, and hoping to us. Unlike Midwest industrial haunts or South Atlantic brewery hubs, New York’s powered equally by 80s gold chain hip-hop and 80s Wall Street cocaine.

We are violence and friction and maybe, by will of our pessimism — the bulky sense that nothing good is allowed to happen to you as a New Yorker — we found an exception. The Knicks should win because we need a win more than anywhere else.

We are addicted to opioids too. We’ve been priced out of our homes and jobs by corporations and their robots. We don’t know what the hell is going on but shit keeps changing without getting cheaper, easier, or smarter. Nothing feels like rest.

Until today.

I walked up to Fancy Free on Lafayette for Spike’s Annual Block Party. It was 18 hours after the Knicks had won the championship when I’d strolled Tompkins Ave in Bed Stuy. I’d never seen so many new New Yorkers like that night.

It scared me. The neighborhood had been majority Black all my life but you wouldn’t know it that Saturday.

Shit keeps changing.

As our group huddled near Herbert Von King Park, we noticed that the main people screaming “Knicks in five” were young and white with mullets. They were rolling in packs. New York looked like a small town, people remarked, but more like a college town in Iowa than a steel town in Jacksonville.

At Fancy Free the next day, the OGs sang hip hop standards. Biggie’s “Warning” and Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones.” Songs made from struggle and grit and crime. We are violence and friction so the songs from that time lay us bare. I snapped pictures of jubilation in graying locs and bamboo earrings. Nike sneakers and Oakley jerseys. I guess we were at a survivor’s rally and we could fit the whole group into a neat quarter-block right off the corner of BAM.

I wanted to let out the flood and couldn’t.

Before and since the Knicks won, I’ve made love. I’ve wept. I’ve sat one hundred percent still. Life has almost nothing left to give me, I figure. I’ve experienced so many rushes as a New Yorker, most from tragedy and sin.

Before and since the Knicks won, I’ve raged. I’ve screamed at a screen that wouldn’t let me in, composed and erased the same text, wondered if me and all the lovers ever loved each other. I’ve passed exes like commuters on a train and forced myself to forget where ecstasy lived.

But I’ll be damned if since the Knicks won, I didn’t think of the wonderful, hopeful, broken and broke-down New York loves who cursed that team with me. I’ll be damned if I didn’t spend the three nights, after the three decades waiting, holding back the flood.

I’ve constructed an entire personality on my relationship to disappointment. I have outsmarted, outfoxed, and denied hope. I have convinced the small light flickering inside me that it is the worst type of fiction: a false god ready to snatch me away. Secretly, I prepared for a humble life because I saw my child-self tearing up every time he lost. I didn’t want to do that to him so we both stopped praying.

Since the Knicks won, I don’t know what do with myself.