The Underdog

The New York Knicks & My Brother.

Here’s what you need to understand about New York: this city has absorbed everything and somehow kept going. That’s not pride. That’s just the record.

Our rats are bigger than yours. Our rents are higher than yours. We’ve stood underground in dead subway cars on random Tuesdays, sweating in total darkness for fifteen minutes, genuinely wondering if we’d ever move again. Not as a metaphor. Just because that’s life here.

We’ve carried 9/11 together. We went through Covid packed into one of the densest cities on earth. Through every version of difficulty, life somehow continued.

And through all of it, many of us kept showing up for the Knicks.

We watched them lose, and lose, and sometimes, almost cruelly, almost win. Nobody accused Knicks fans of being bandwagon fans because there was no bandwagon to speak of. Rooting for the Knicks was less an exercise in optimism than one in loyalty. They were our underdog.

Now here we are. Kids climbing on buses. Fathers hugging sons. Best friends nearly i…