When the New York Knicks won I saw a city celebrate.

I saw a city heave with exultation. I saw people who had guarded their souls because of decades of hurt finally let down the shields and embrace the joy. I saw people breathe, and feel, in a way they hadn’t in years. I saw people cry; I saw their childish wonder that had been beaten out of them by decades of frustration and failure coming pouring out in yelps and cries and tears. I saw people heal in front of my very eyes.

When the New York Knicks won I saw a city celebrate. From 20,000 kilometers away.

And I celebrated too.

***

Becoming a fan of an NBA team from overseas is a strange phenomenon. I’ve never been to New York. Not seen the hallowed floorboards at Madison Square. I will never be part of the circus that occurs outside. I do not have a parent who gave me the curse of following a team that had not won the whole thing since the Vietnam War. I chose this mess, this pain and this depression. And now I choose this joy.

Australian fans come to teams in strange ways. Some choose a history to embrace. Some love the sport, the storylines and find themselves drawn to a team. Some small children find a player and get caught up in following their team. Some terrible people choose the Lakers because they like winning. A friend who is a Golden State Warriors fan loved Latrell Sprewell, who happened to play for the Warriors at the right time in their life. They chose well.

I landed on the New York Knicks because Larry Johnson sold ten-year old me Converse Reacts, which to this day are the coolest shoes I’ve ever owned. He played for the Charlotte Hornets at the time, but would be traded to the Knicks right as basketball had captured my interest. Back then we followed basketball through highlights packages on late night news, and scores listed in the ‘results’ page of the newspaper. We’d know the score of a game a day after it happened, and maybe which player scored the most points. There was no rhyme or reason to why I loved Larry Johnson. But I did. And so when the Hornets sent him to New York, they sent me too.

Timing is a funny thing. If the Knicks had gone right into their decade long depression then and there I may have lost interest and been spared the pain. But in 1999 they made a finals run just I got regular access to the internet. Suddenly I wasn’t just checking scores in the back of the newspaper, but actually able to read match reports of games. I remember reading about Larry Johnson’s four-point play in the Dickson College library years before I ever actually saw it.

We finally got internet in my house and I could fully embrace my passion. The internet could offer me anything and I was reading yahoo sports articles about the Knicks. I don’t even think video highlights packages even existed. I just read endless articles about basketball. About Larry Johnson. About the Knicks. I was hooked. Unfortunately, that run was more the last gasp of greatness than beginning of perennial contender.

The years that followed were not good. The Layden and Thomas regimes brought chaos of mismatched players, bloated contracts, and scandal. After Jeff Van Gundy came a list of coaches who all seemed so ill-fitted to the task that it’s remarkable to look back and see Don Chaney lasted three years, or Mike D’Antoni four. Larry Brown seemed like the wrong man for the job, even from my vantage point in Canberra. Donnie Walsh returned respectability, but it didn’t last long.

At some point I could finally afford League Pass. Finally, the freedom to watch all the Knicks I wanted. A second chance to fall in love. First came Linsanity and then came the Mike Woodson pace and space Knicks came along, shooting threes around Melo in the pinch post and I was again hooked. Both were sugar hits. They were also a reminder of how exciting it seemed, even from here, when things were cooking in the Garden.

Following the Knicks for all these years from this far, and in this time zone, is a different experience than for locals. Watching games at 11am, or sneaking the replay after my family had gone to bed. Seeing games in between moments of life. I’ve watched more basketball on my lunch break than I’ve had conversations with people in the break room. Strategic breaks around close games, rushing through errands on a Saturday morning so I can be home for ‘Friday Night Knicks’. It’s all part of the weird way people in my time zone are forced to engage with the game. 

When the O.G. Anunoby miracle-on-miracle-on-miracles happened, I was home looking after my sick child, getting through a regular workday. I picked him up and hurled him around like he was the Larry O’Brien trophy. What he enjoyed the most was that ‘Dad lost his mind’. And it’s true. I did. And, heart still racing, brain still reeling, I went back to work.

I have zero people in my life that I can talk Knicks with. I have friends who love basketball. But they don’t love the Knicks. They didn’t want to have a conversation about how Frank Williams might be the answer (he wasn’t), or how Alonzo Trier is a bucket (ooft) or how Carmelo is misunderstood, and how people don’t get how good Lance Thomas is, or how this team could really be something if Ray Felton just doesn’t get too fat. These are thoughts I had in my head, and no one to share them with. Just me, my dumb basketball brain, twitter and a league pass account. 

It sounds bad, but it had its advantages. Through all these years of following a horrific basketball team, I never had to face with that in my day to day. There was no one coming to me to ask why my Knicks were terrible. I was rarely faced with a fellow fan rubbing their team’s superiority in my face. I just turned the game on, got depressed, and skipped through podcast segments about why they were terrible. I could put the Knicks away when they hurt because while I love the Knicks, I don’t live them like New York does. 

My eight-year-old son, who started following the games with me this year, was the only person I would talk to about this. “Hey guess what bud? Brunson had 30 today.” “The Knicks won another” “They’re up 1-0 on the Hawks”, “They just beat the Cavs and they’re in the finals!!!” followed by my descriptions of what happened, his questions about Jalen Brunson and me looking at him and wondering if we’re starting a new tradition of our own, a world away from MSG. He doesn’t know it, but he’s been leading a blessed life. 

That’s been plainly clear over the last ten weeks or so. I’ve watched playoff games out of the corner of my during the day, rehashed them at night and reveled in the scenes outside Madison Square Garden. It always made me smile, but also jealous because deep down there’s something about celebrating with people that is immensely human, a shared heartbeat, a collective effervescence of shared emotion, one of the biggest cities in the world heaving together in collective breath.

***

When game five ended I was driving our family to my son’s birthday party. My wife was holding my phone, trying to narrate what we she was seeing on the screen as I navigated traffic. Like Knicks fans across the world I was screaming and cursing and yelping whenever I could work out was happening without taking my eyes off the road. I was nervous. I was anxious. I was terrified at it being so close and it not happening. Too many years of conditioning had told me good things don’t happen.

When that Wemby shot careened into OG’s arms I slammed the roof of my car like I was carving a path to heaven. I celebrated with my family. I tried to explain to them, to my 8 year old, just why this mattered. About Walt. About Patrick. About LJ and Spree. Starks and Marbury and Melo and 53 years of heartbreak and hope. Of 8 million people who were going to go into the streets and together find salvation in the arms of a basketball team that had finally delivered a celebration craved for decades. Mike Breen said ‘go ahead and cry’ and I knew he was speaking to me, but mostly to you, and a lot to himself.

I tried to explain the hours I’d sat watching games in a corner of an office, a house, on public transport and in public places. By myself. Watching a godawful basketball team for no real reason other than a twelve-year-old me had fallen in love and couldn’t walk away. All that came out was the breaking voice and some incoherent rambling and the manliest tears a man can let escape while he’s operating heavy machinery. I was filled with joy. Relief. Belief.

I shared this moment with my family, some more interested than others, but more bewildered than not. I shared this moment with people on the internet that I know love the Knicks like me. I did not share it, body to body, face to face, like the people outside MSG, or on the streets of New York. I watched years of pain melt away on the faces of people who I’ve known, but never seen in person, for 30 plus years. I felt such happiness for them, because if from a million miles away my soul was quietened, I could not imagine how they felt. 

Maybe I’ll never be as happy as the people of New York. Maybe I can’t love the Knicks the way they do, knowing the history not as something written down but something they lived, in the building, in the city, in the moment. But right now, this happiness, this level of contentment. No wonder New York seems like it’s exploded. I’m 20000 miles away.

And I couldn’t be happier. 

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