I almost didn't see it

You will not believe what happened to me.

I had spent late Saturday afternoon and evening at a barbecue in a friend’s courtyard, counting down the minutes until a basketball game I never thought I would get to watch. Once the game started people inexplicably tried to talk to me about anything else, which I would not partake in.

Eventually, there were 26.1 seconds left in Game 5 on Saturday night and Josh Hart was at the free throw line with the Knicks up two. Hart hit one shot and then he missed the second. Before I could consider suicide, nine-fingered Mitchell Robinson heroically outworked four San Antonio Spurs (including Ent-ass bitch Victor Wembanyama) for the offensive rebound, heaved the ball out to OG Anunoby behind the three-point line and the Spurs had to foul again. 

The Knicks’ win probability was up to 88.6% with 21.6 seconds left to go and the Knicks up 3-1 in the NBA Finals. It was happening. An entire life spent watching my friends from out of town be happy about basketball was finally culminating in me being happy about basketball. No one would look at my weird Knicks hat and shake their head knowingly as I did the same in the world's saddest call and response.

The game was being projected onto a big blowup screen in my friend’s backyard, which she had purchased when she realized her birthday barbecue was being sacrificed to the Knicks championship aspirations, the same way Tim and wife of the blog Callie’s pre-wedding drinks/rehearsal dinner turned into a Game 2 watch party, the same way that while I hung out in a courtyard, elsewhere, my friend Jake turned his speech at a wedding into a metaphor about the greatest tip shot in NBA history.

The frigidity of individualism was out the door this summer, replaced by the collective warmth of solidarity (with the Knicks). This happens sometimes. 

There’s an old family story about the time during the Rangers 1994 Stanley Cup Final run, my parents’ friend had a 40th birthday party that happened to coincide with Game 7 of the 1994 Eastern Conference Finals. My dad turned the game on at the house during the party, and as one of the greatest hockey games ever took an agonizing two overtimes to end, the center of the gravity of the party slowly but surely drifted to the television. Even the band stopped playing. My dad’s friend was pretty mad at him, but again, this happens sometimes.

In that courtyard on Saturday night, as OG Anunoby prepared to take his free throws, someone decided it was the perfect time to walk directly in front of the table where the projector, and all of the all-important wires connecting the projector and phone hotspot and phone streaming the game, were perilously placed. 

Demonstrating all the grace and footwork of Frederic Weis, the person walking past the projector tripped right over the wires and the screen blinked to black. It was the computer lab scene from PCU brought to terrible life, except in this instance the perpetrator didn’t show a hint of remorse.

“Hey I made the burgers,” the worst person in the world told us as bedlam erupted in the yard.

There was screaming, there were demands that the hosts fix this fucking shit right now, there were some people huddling around phones to see the closing moments, because the projector had to be plugged in and refocused and YouTube TV had to be reloaded and the game found and the overwhelmed people trying to fix it were doing their best; there were screams of “no spoilers!” at the people watching on phones. There was so much yelling, and no one had the slow heartbeat of Jalen Brunson at that moment. Personally I did not. I had used the totality of my nerve reserves to keep things quiet inside when I officiated Tim and Callie’s wedding the week before.

In all of the yelling I just kept thinking “I am going to miss it.” And then I wondered, a terrible thing. If the Knicks held on, which I figured they would, and I didn’t get to see the Spurs’ final full court desperation heave fall short, or Josh Hart pull down a rebound with 5 seconds and no one bothering to foul him as the clock hit zero, would it count for me? Would I have seen the Knicks win the NBA Finals if I didn’t see them win the NBA Finals?

Support independent local journalism. Become a member of The Groove today and you will unlock perks, discounts and more!

Join The Groove

My life as a Knicks fan flashed before my eyes. Like so many even more committed Knicks fans have done in the moments since the Finals ended, I thought about the names, the terrible names I had seen and wondered if it all was for nothing. Jerome James. Shandon Anderson. Othella Harrington. Willy Hernangómez. Did I dream of pushing Scott Layden down a flight of stairs only to not see the moment it all stopped mattering? One of my first-ever blog posts, fortunately lost to the broken ecosystem of the internet, was a smirking defense of putting Stephon Marbury and Steve Francis in the same backcourt, something I knew was ripshit stupid but that I also had no choice but to hope for the best.

If I didn’t see the last arduous seconds melt off of a 53-year drought, a world-historic fallow endless dust bowl that included me watching this happen live and watching Kevin Knox summer league clips and convincing myself that the Knicks really had something here and watching the James Dolan deposition, would it count for me? Would I have to listen to other people’s screaming coming from the street or other yards as a signal that it happened, and I missed it?

I didn’t have to answer those questions in the end. The game blinked back on the screen just in time for The Shame of France to brick one last three pointer and OG to pull in the rebound, and it was over.

The chaos and tension of it all was still present in the moment as people hugged and high-fived, but while I saw it, all I felt was a glaring disconnect after coming so close to missing it. I didn’t cry, maybe because I missed Mike Breen giving Knicks fans permission to do it. I turned around and left and looked for the action in the streets because, while my friends were nice enough to have hosted the whole thing, I had to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Looking back on it, I’m not going to defend myself as the best party guest that evening. The closer we got to tip-off, the tighter I got. I could not sit to watch the game, and as the Knicks bricked shot after shot to start the game I couldn’t convince myself I’d seen all this before or that the Spurs would wilt. I could not summon Katie Baker’s faith, as reasonable as it was just based on the facts of every other game in the series.

One of my friends tried to talk to me about a commercial that was playing and I told him in a flat voice that I wasn’t seeing anything on the screen that wasn’t basketball. Callie asked how I was doing at halftime and my response, rude as Hell in retrospect, was “You know what the problem here is, I don’t have anyone to talk to about basketball.” 

It was rude but also true. I did not know many people there and wasn’t about to just start walking up to anyone and everyone there to talk to about the Knicks going to a Brunson/Alvarado backcourt early, or to seek solace with a stranger in the one thing I convinced myself of in an attempt to gain some zen, which was that the Knicks bench could not literally shoot 0 percent from the field for the whole game (trying to convince myself of this made things very bad on the way to the bench scoring a ghastly 9 points on inexplicable 4-18 shooting). 

Sucking myself deep enough into this year’s team that I watched multiple film breakdowns of how they erased their 29-point deficit in Game 4 meant that unless someone there was going to draw up plays with me to get that egg magnet out of the paint I was in a hell of my own making even before the plug was pulled.

Still, I did see it and it did happen. It will be, as Seth Rosenthal wrote, a fact sitting there on a shelf in my mind palace forever. Maybe because of the insane final moments surrounding it, it will look a little bit like one of those waterlogged books that gets caught in a flood or a rainstorm or that you accidentally spill beer on because it’s sitting out on a table. 

But inside that book cover is also the fact that as I wandered the streets in a daze, unsure of what I was going to do other than buy more beer, Callie and Tim saw me from the other side of the street and demanded I ride Citi Bikes with them, so off we went through the streets of Williamsburg and then an eerily quiet South Williamsburg and then Bed-Stuy while I screamed “Hey who won the Finals?” at people and we kept pace with a car playing “Empire State of Mind” and screamed along with it with the driver. And then walking up Franklin Avenue with a six pack of Modelo and loving everyone and trying to start a “JOSH HART (clap-clap)” chant walking past Crown Inn and even loving that cop who took a beer right out of my hand and kept walking, and the madness of the Vanderbilt Avenue open street still going after midnight with fireworks and a DJ and me high-fiving a guy in a Ronny Turiaf jersey and having multiple people walk up to me or past me and saying “Is that a David Lee jersey?” to or at me. That’s all there too.

The Knicks did it and I almost didn’t see it. But I did.