Gemini Chaos

People think Knicks fans are the most insane people ever – and I’m not even referring to the “fans” who are tearing up the city for attention (I don’t count them as fans). But as I sit here on hour four of a delay getting home from San Antonio, I’d like to attempt to convince you that we’re not just crazy fanatics. Hear me out.

Imagine the mentality of a person who has to accept that a sports franchise is so messed up that, most days, it feels like there is zero hope that the richest team in the league will ever be good. Not even asking for them to be winners – just to be more good than bad. That’s us. And prior to last night, I never really thought about what decades of that conditioning does to a person’s psyche and life outlook.

Loving the Knicks has got to be one of the silliest but most consistent reminders in life that we, as individuals and as a collective community, are powerless. Of all the things that have evolved and changed over the course of my life, this is one of the only things that’s felt static and true through time. Then last night, that truth—which is the ONLY truth that anyone under the age of 50 can remember—suddenly disappeared. As the seconds wound down in Frost Bank Center, I could hear multiple people murmur and shout, “Ohmigod, it’s really happening” around me.

This will sound dramatic, but for many of us, when we finally got to 0.0 and emerged the champions, the whole universe shifted in a number of ways.

1. The meaning of basketball in this basketball town will never be the same again

Every incremental glimmer of hope we’ve had in this team for decades has held 100X the meaning, because we were in a pressure cooker that never got a release. There were stretches of time where winning just two consecutive games was cause for celebration—that is how broken we were.

When we suddenly got a player on our roster who had any level of hustle (looking at you, David Lee!) we cherished them like they were the greatest gift to basketball. When our guys were fighting or bullying the shit out of other teams, we didn’t get to take it all the way, but at least we were tough. Our rivalries are intense because we’ve needed a place to channel this deep sense of rage constantly brewing under the surface.

Starting next season, basketball wins big and small are just going to be basketball wins—not a symbol of decades of loss and trauma, not a baby carrot of false hope, but literally just good or bad basketball. To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of fan I’m going to be at that point. It’s like we have finally reached the goal, and now everything that comes next just means that much less. Of course, I still want to keep winning and to see them ball out. But I think some of my fellow fans will know what I’m saying here.

2. We all (not just Knicks fans) needed the ‘good guys’ to win

We live in a moment in history where it’s increasingly, painfully obvious that we don’t live in a meritocracy. For people from other countries, this may have always been obvious, but in the U.S. many of us grew up having an almost religious belief in the value of earning your success. Even those who’ve lived the brunt of reality of it being untrue, our history books, success stories of people in the news, an observable amount of socioeconomic mobility in our growing economy, not to mention some of our civil rights victories, did mean older millennials, Generation X, and Boomers could strive for a brighter future.

In more recent times, the disruption of many industries that were the core drivers of prosperity for the American middle class have been disrupted, and the political climate has polarized us to the point where it often feels irreconcilable. Different people will point to different reasons why things simply feel shitty—but what we can all agree on, is that they do, indeed feel shitty. And no matter what you believe, there’s a lot that feels unfair these days.

This particular squad is a unifying force rather than a polarizing one, and it’s not only because New York is a sports market in which we have competing teams for every single professional sport but no one cares about the Nets (although this is true). I believe it’s actually because these Knicks exemplify the work ethic, integrity, strategy, team work, and sheer force of will that people want to see rewarded. In the tale of the meritocracy we’re supposed to be, THESE are the qualities of winners, and every single person on the 2025-26 Knicks possess these qualities in spades.

I am in the last leg of a long, delayed journey home from San Antonio and it’s been joyous to connect with other Knicks fans, and also to have non-Knicks fans come up to me and congratulate us for a deserved win, and to tell us that our team is simply un-hatable. Our captain, our MVP, the true GOAT Jalen Brunson took a massive pay cut and put his ego aside to build a winning team. He led by example, with pure class from start to finish.

We were both the better team and the bigger team (in the figurative sense), and it means something beyond basketball that the chip went to the team that earned it. It shows everyone, inside and outside New York (except the more delusional Spurs fans) that the values we were taught, DO mean something—at least in this small corner of the universe.

3. Hope, resurrected

I think most of us know what it feels to have something we felt like we’ve longed for, for a lifetime. It could be in any aspect of life—finding love, being rich, having children, achieving success, reconnecting with someone we’ve lost, a Knicks championship, whatever. And when you go long enough without ever getting it, you sort of mature into a state of acceptance that it will never happen.

We don’t talk often enough about how the process of growing older involves some amount of acceptance that some things are not meant for our time on this earth. There comes a point in everyone’s life where we transition from having only unknown possibilities to look forward to, to being jaded by the possibilities we haven’t realized, and will never realize.

Though I always held some hope for a Knicks championship, somewhere along the way I developed a conviction that the moment would never come. Too many things had gone wrong; too many false starts had led nowhere; too many problems felt unsurmountable and made us truly feel cursed. Our bright spots (Linsanity!) were short lived, and always felt like one step forward, two steps back. When Dolan had Charles Oakley forcibly removed from the Garden I was so filled with rage I boycotted (cancelled League Pass and refused to spend a dime on the NBA/Knicks) for three seasons.

When we started building the current team, we did not dare hope. In retrospect, every move now feels clearly intentional, and yet we were so scarred from the decades preceding that we wouldn’t let ourselves have hope again. I was far from the worst of it; I actually unfollowed friends who made hating on the Knicks their entire personality, even as the Nova Knicks came together and started making moves, to the point where I didn’t even know why they called themselves fans anymore. They’d clearly lost the plot. But that’s what losing hope does to a person.

So now, the impossible has happened. Our minds are fully blown. Suddenly, we exist in a universe where things that are definitely impossible, are not actually impossible. We live in a reality where everyone in your life can believe something will never happen, and the entire world may think you’re stupid for even wanting something to happen, and they can all be wrong.

These are the reasons why these Knicks have changed our lives, and why they had grown adults around the country weeping tears of joy and hugging strangers in the street. I don’t think this is a buzz that’s going to go way, I really do feel like a whole new person.

Do you?