Нью-Йорк Никс 53 жилийн дараа аваргын цомыг өргөлөө

SAN ANTONIO — My father is not a religious man, nor is he a die-hard of any basketball team. For 77 years, he has committed himself to logic, driven by an unemotional, mathematical mind.

On Wednesday, his brain chemistry rewired.

Because he is Queens-born and has spent his life in New York, because he is an obsessive baseball fan able to appreciate how difficult it is for a team to rev to a championship, and because his son is constantly around an organization that just made history, the New York Knicks have consumed him over the past few months.

He sped through the cycle of Knicks fandom. First, he loved Jalen Brunson, then OG Anunoby. Next, he recognized some more subtle details of the game, like the value of Mitchell Robinson’s rebounding. By the beginning of the playoffs, he would not miss a minute of any game. He started to hate certain referees with the same ire he expresses for C.B. Bucknor’s over-the-top strikeout calls. Such is the sign of a true sports fan.

On Wednesday, the same night his new favorite team pulled off the greatest comeback in finals history, he succumbed to the Knicks. Everything I thought I knew about my father, a man with an even keel that would make Brunson jealous and an IQ I’m not sure I could count to, turned to dust.

The Knicks trailed by as many as 29 points that evening, at risk of giving back a 2-0 NBA Finals series lead. At halftime, with the Knicks down 27, my dad changed to another chair in his living room. He did not move for the rest of the game.

New York was plus-28 with Ray Katz resting in that seat. The Karl-Anthony Towns fallaway 3, his layup over Victor Wembanyama, all the Anunoby scores, all the Brunson buckets, the historic Anunoby swat and the even more unforgettable Anunoby tip-in to give the Knicks a 3-1 series lead — he attributes it all to his bum sinking into that one cushion.

So when my dad sat down to watch Game 5 of the finals, when the Knicks had a chance to garner their first title in 53 years, he headed to the same spot with a plan.

In the days between Games 4 and 5, my dad acquired one of those portable urinals, the plastic jar with a handle on the side designed specifically for people who are injured and unable to move. You see them more often in hospitals than at watch parties. But my father — the same man who raised me and my brother on intellect, who had me read the newspaper before going to school every morning, who declined to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics because he had “already read all the textbooks” — was physically fine. On Saturday, for the first time in portable urinal history, the product became essential not because of physical need but because of superstition.

After the greatest comeback in NBA history, my dad would have rather accidentally sprinkled on the carpet than risk the first Knicks title in 53 years by so selfishly retreating to the bathroom. The players preach constantly about sacrifice. This was his way of doing so, of committing to the team — and yes, it seems he does need to be committed. This is how much Saturday night meant to him, to an entire city, to a state, to a fanbase, some of whom haven’t even been along for the majority of the ride.

This is how hungry New York was for a championship, one that for years it felt like would never arrive. Now, it finally has.

The Knicks, the same organization that spent the better part of two decades as an NBA punchline, are champs for the first time since 1973. The title became official Saturday when they closed out the San Antonio Spurs with a 94-90 road victory.

Their legacy outside of New York will stem from their work on the court, from how they came together to vault to their best basketball ever over the preceding two months, from how they changed the legacies of Brunson and Towns and Anunoby, from how they forced the basketball world to rethink how important an undersized point guard could be to a ring. But inside the city or even the state is the unifying factor of it all.

My dad does not have a clue about Patrick Ewing’s finger roll or Charles Smith’s layups. The name Jerome James means nothing to him. He thinks that Andrea Bargnani is a type of pasta. He did not suffer through the most mismanaged era in league history, as so many Knicks fans did. But he is also not a bandwagoner, someone who only cares this deeply for the sake of fair weather or because he is compelled to post for clout on an Instagram page he would never create.

He is a New Yorker. And if there is one cause New Yorkers can get behind, it is this team. In an era when any declaration, even one as seemingly universal as “puppies are cute,” is met with dissent, the Knicks are the city’s great unifier.

They are the one major-league sports team that runs unopposed in New York. The Yankees own the bigger national brand, the gaudy 27 championships. You’ll see their logo in any country to which you travel. But a large portion of New York also roots for the Mets. And those fans don’t merely refrain from rooting for the Yankees, they despise them. The Giants have the Jets. The Rangers have the Islanders. The Knicks have … no one else.

Forget about the ill-behaved, performative fans hoping to go viral on TikTok for unseemly behavior. New York, away from the cameras, is littered with Knicks bugouts. My phone has blown up over the past few weeks with texts, some from people I haven’t spoken to since high school, not even bothering to say hello and jumping straight into Knicks mania.

“This is so much better than rooting for Chris Duhon,” one text read. I did not even have the number saved. Whoever this was clearly could not hold back.

Another friend texted me an old picture of him, smiling ear to ear, in front of a billboard with Kemba Walker’s face on it. Walker was one of the many who would finally provide the Knicks with a competent point guard — until he did not. Midway through the 2021-22 season, Walker left the team. Months later, New York attached a first-round pick just so it could trade the remainder of his contract, opening up the cap room to supposedly overpay another point guard, Brunson.

There is a 2004 Boston Red Sox or 2016 Chicago Cubs element to this championship, even if the wait was not as long for the Knicks as it was for either of those two franchises. Still, these are famously passionate fanbases, ones who decades of heartbreak could not deter, a mass of people defined not by their triumphs but by their humiliation.

The Sox went 86 years without a championship; the Cubs went 108. But it does seem the Knicks made up for lost time. They fell one win short in 1994. They kissed away a title opportunity in 1995. After their current owner, James Dolan, took over the team in the late 1990s, the only guarantee about the Knicks was chaos.

They overreacted, overpaid, over-lost, gave away draft picks as if they didn’t matter and created scandals along the way. For decades, any reference to the Knicks in pop culture was a dig, save for one. In the 2003 romcom “How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days,” which places a man who has a week-and-a-half to convince a woman to fall in love with him alongside a woman who is writing an article about how to maneuver a breakup, the most unrealistic plot line is that throughout the film, the Knicks are playing in the NBA Finals.

Only in a fantasyland could the Knicks have made it so far.

Two decades later, Knicks fans have reacted as if this run — which closed out with only three playoff losses by a combined six points— must not be real life. They are traveling in droves to road games. They took over the Philadelphia 76ers’ home arena in Round 2 and swept the Sixers. Then, they did the same to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference finals, another sweep. The reward? Thirteen consecutive victories, the second-longest playoff winning streak in league history — and, more importantly, the third title in franchise history.

The fans who followed closely the whole way, which is a large portion of them, have waited for this moment for years. The ones who were around to see Walt Frazier and Willis Reed’s titles in 1970 and 1973 have stood by for more than half a century, along the way incurring the jeers that accompany telling anyone their favorite team is the go-to example of incompetence.

Now, for the first time in the lives of many, there is a sense of pride in declaring Knicks fandom. Today, in a world where the Knicks are NBA champions, a Knicks fan’s only embarrassment comes from accidentally missing the portable urinal.