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The loudest I’ve ever heard Knicks fans at Madison Square Garden was May 16, 1997.
Game 6, Knicks vs. Heat. 48 hours earlier, P.J. Brown lit the match that David Stern’s dumb de jure brain fanned into the fire that torched the ’90s Knicks last shot at MJ and the Bulls, ergo their last shot at a title. 19,763 New Yorkers cheering their team is one thing. Add a righteous indignation to the mix and you get a sound like none I’ve heard before or since. The sound of bloodlust.
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I’m old now. Old enough that day after day I see more and more people I’m older than, and fewer that I’m not. Old enough to recognize the ties that bind me to the New York Knickerbockers differ from those that connect me to my other sports loves. Old enough to feel like I know something too many people have forgotten, or never knew. Old enough to realize how much the world has passed me by, too.
The first year I followed the Mets, they won the World Series. The first time I sat to watch an entire Rangers playoffs, they won the Stanley Cup. The first two times the Giants made the Super Bowl, they won. And the first season Manchester City stood up on both legs to challenge for the league title, they won, thanks to a miracle finish that still makes me tear up whenever I see it. I’m literally crying with joy re-watching it now.
And then there’s the Knicks.
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The Knicks are the team I’ve followed the closest. Other than a few games at the end of the Isiah Thomas era, I’ve watched just about every game I could see since 1990. They’re as much a part of my identity as anything else. But my history with them is . . . different.
The Knicks did not win it all the first year I watched them. They finished 39-43, got destroyed in the first round. The next year, they shocked the world going up on the world champion Bulls, took them all the way to Game 7. The Mets would have won that game. The Messier Rangers would have. Man City? Definitely. But not, bless ’em, my Knicks.
I’m old enough that the young fans are scaring me. For me and for them. The same inherited idiocy that led a generation of Knick playoff virgins to radicalize Trae Young…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/young-knicks-fans-expecting-best-230353102.html
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Publish date : 2026-06-07 23:03:00
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