It’s usually surprising to new friends and acquaintances in my life when they discover I used to kind of be a “sports dude.” I was raised in a house with a very talented high school athlete (high school talent, but not D1 or D2 talent), a father who’d once been pretty good at baseball (and was still very good at softball), and an extended family that worshipped at various altars of collegiate and professional sports. Let’s just say we never missed a Saturday in the fall, watched every single Olympics as a family, and planned whole trips around baseball stadiums. Despite this omnipresence in my childhood, sports was never forced on me nor was it expected that I’d build my entire personality around it. And so, for years of my life, despite being a sword & sorcery, sex & death nerd, I was INTO SPORTS.

As I aged deeper into adulthood, I reconciled this interest in sports as both a fascination with all the ways our young, stupid country seeks to mythologize itself and as a way to maintain connections to distant friends, coworkers, and family members I might otherwise find it difficult to connect with without them. And the sport that most stood the test of time, the one I most tried to hold onto even as my interest shifted and faded, was basketball.

In the 90s of my youth, I had no difficulty holding onto a love of basketball at all. That was the 90s of Michael Jordan, Charlotte Hornets Starter Jackets, Nike Dunks, NBA Jam, the MTV Rock n’ Jock celebrity game, the Dream Team, and more. To say that basketball represented a fervent fascination for me and many other kids like me would be an understatement. This love was also fueled in no small part by the fact that basketball was the only athletic expression I possessed even a modicum of skill in. I was no team hooper, but I won more pick-up games than I lost and my jumper was accurate and flat footed, just like my fellow husky hero, Charles Barkley.

At that formative age where you’re a teenager but still not quite a TEENAGER, basketball became a major part of my personality. I consumed it, I clothed myself in it, I claimed mastery of its statistics and idiosyncrasies. Basketball became a conduit to a broader culture that my rural Southern hometown would have otherwise struggled to connect me with. It’s not hyperbole to say that basketball helped me connect to kids that the class and racial divides still very present in a small Tennessee town in 1993 tried to convince me were insurmountable. Basketball gave me friends when I struggled to otherwise make any. Gave me a community that stood up to my bullies for me. Basketball made me better.

In spite of this love for the sport, over the last several years I’ve found it harder to reconcile the ethical trade-offs of supporting the owners, companies, and organizations that use sports as a deeply unethical form of extraction capital with the athletes themselves and their unmatched capacity to create class-spanning spectacles of visceral emotional solidarity. These days, I mostly don’t watch them at all. But occasionally, something feels so big, so special, so OURS, that it pierces the veil of late-stage capitalism, grabs you by the hand, and says, “Come on, we’re all going to feel something REAL together.” I’m not sure there’s a form of entertainment better suited for creating those moments than sports. And New York City is absolutely having one of those moments right now.

If you really don’t know anything about sports, or you’re just living under a rock, the Knicks went up 2 - 0 in the NBA Finals, on the road, against a very talented young San Antonio Spurs squad. Nobody wins two on the road and this unlikely streak put the Knicks in the catbird seat coming back to their home court for Game 3. Their home court, of course, being the most hallowed ground in all of professional basketball: MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. The city was alive, street poets were making up incredible chants about the Knicks winning in just four games (it’s a best 4 out of 7 series), and even the mayor himself was attending the watch parties. And then, as if played in by that classic “dun dun dun” organ sound that cartoons play when the plot decides to finally twist, everyone’s least favorite New Yorker decided he would come home for the game.

So, yeah, Donald Trump ruined Game 3 of the NBA Finals. He had watch parties near MSG canceled, shut down half the city for his particularly half-baked brand of sleepy propaganda, and then literally fell asleep in his luxury box by the third quarter. The Knicks lost. With a 2 - 0 lead and all the power of playing with a cacophonous MSG crowd behind them, the Knicks lost. It was 100% Donald Trump’s fault. But then, something miraculous happened.

Multiple members of the city performed rites and rituals to cleanse MSG of its bad vibes, places that would never even think about having watch parties rushed to make sure they’d have the game on, the same poet who had created the now famous “My Mayor Muslim, My Bagels Jewish, My Christian Dior, Knicks in Four” chant came back with something even better: “My Mayor Still Muslim, My Bagels Still Jewish, The Pope’s On Our Side, Knicks in Five,” and the city rallied as only the greatest city in the world could. And then the Knicks spent three quarters of basketball utterly shitting the bed, going down 29 points to the Spurs and all but assuring a tied series going back to San Antonio. And then, they reached through the miasma.

Two nights and three bad quarters of basketball after Fearless Leader had sullied the Garden, the Knicks put the entire city on their back and said, “Oh that man? You don’t have to worry about that man anymore,” before executing the biggest comeback in the history of the NBA Finals. A truly transcendent experience, a once-in-a-lifetime sports moment, that snatched victory from defeat, hope from hate, and joy from despair. And in a Summer already exhausted by increased ICE activity, flash floods, and a heatwave so bad my dog won’t move more than an inch even in the AC, the Knicks stared into he void and when it stared back, they fucking ROARED.

I’ve never been a Knicks fan. Actually kind of hated them when I was a kid. But you know what I don’t hate, what I in fact love more than just about anything in the whole wide world? New York FUCKING City.

Let’s Go Knicks!