For most of my life, being a Knicks fan wasn't about basketball. Basketball was the excuse. The actual activity was suffering.
Every Knicks fan I know has a story. Not about a championship. About a couch. A basement. A father. A friend who moved away. A guy at the bar who looked like he hadn't smiled since 1999.
The Knicks were never our religion because they won. They were our religion because they didn't. Anyone can root for a winner. That's not interesting. What's interesting is willingly showing up for disappointment three times a week and convincing yourself this time will be different. That's New York.
I learned this from people whose names I never knew. The old men at pickup basketball. The guys screaming at televisions in pizzerias. The barber who swore every season was over by Thanksgiving and somehow still watched all 82 games. The guy at the end of the bar who could tell you where he was for every playoff collapse the way other people remember weddings.
The Knicks were a support group disguised as a sports franchise. You'd walk into a room full of strangers and immediately have something in common. Not because life was good. Because life wasn't.
We all remembered where we were for Charles Smith. For Reggie Miller. For John Starks. For Stephon Marbury. For that annual stretch around February when you convinced yourself the Knicks were only three pieces away before realizing all three pieces were LeBron James. The Knicks weren't giving us victories. They were giving us a language.
From the outside, the city can look like a collection of stars—everyone chasing attention, ambition, some version of being the main character. But if you're paying attention, you realize that's not how anything actually works here. The city runs on people setting screens they don't get credit for. On assistants, teachers, line cooks, nurses, stagehands, doormen, parents, friends. On people doing their job so somebody else can do theirs. Humility. Selflessness. Knowing when to pass. Maybe that's part of what's resonating about this Knicks team.
The thing nobody tells you about losing for decades is that eventually it becomes part of your identity. The suffering develops traditions. Inside jokes. Shared references. Its own mythology. The Knicks became one of the last things in New York that everybody still shared. Teachers. Construction workers. Lawyers. Subway conductors. Billionaires. The guy sleeping on three train seats. Everybody had an opinion. Everybody had a story.
Then the Knicks got good.
The suffering had been replaced with something much more dangerous: hope.
People started checking the standings every morning. Playoff tickets became family heirlooms. Grown men started hugging strangers outside Madison Square Garden. Suddenly the jokes stopped working. The cynicism felt outdated. The annual ritual of preparing for heartbreak was interrupted by actual competence. For the first time in decades, Knicks fans found themselves facing a question they never expected: What if the thing we've been waiting for actually happens?
My uncle Ray has season tickets. During Game 1 against Cleveland, with the Knicks down twenty, he got into an argument with a fan sitting behind him who wouldn't stop booing.
As he tells it, he finally turned around and yelled, "Hey! Shut the *** up! Don't boo our ****'in Knicks. Either support our boys or shut the front door."
Things escalated. The fan started chirping back. Then the fan's father got involved. Then security got involved. The whole thing became a production.
When he called me afterward, he spent five minutes telling the story before I stopped him.
"Wait. The father got involved?"
"Yeah."
"How old was this guy?"
“…old enough to know better.”
Forty minutes later, the Knicks completed one of the most ridiculous comebacks in franchise history. By the end of the night, Uncle Ray was jumping and hugging the young fan, the father, and the security guard. The whole thing sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But that's also kind of the point.
Maybe that's why this run feels different. Not because they're winning, because winning changes the conversation. For decades, being a Knicks fan meant understanding disappointment— the lesson everyone knows but not everyone understands. You kind of have to live it first.
With the Knicks, you knew the script. You knew where the movie ended. Hope was something you kept in the glove compartment for emergencies. Now hope is everywhere... and hope is dangerous.
Hope makes you care again. It can make people who swore they'd never believe again start checking injury reports at six in the morning. Hope makes New Yorkers call people they haven't spoken to in years. It makes complete strangers high-five each other on the sidewalk. For twenty-five years, Knicks fans prepared themselves for disappointment.
Nobody prepared for success. That's why this run feels bigger than basketball.
Bobby Friedman is a Brooklyn-based writer, filmmaker and educator. He is the writer/director of The Damn Knicks, a comedy short released in partnership with Knicks Fan TV, and his work has been featured by Amazon Prime Video and Atlantic Records.
