The New York Knicks Are the Perfect Antidote
This won’t last forever. It’s not supposed to. But let America's team cure what ails you.
By Megan Armstrong
I don’t mean to make the New York Knicks winning their first NBA title since 1973 about me, but they’ve left me with no other choice.
In January 2020, I sat on a cot in my New York City apartment, three blocks from Madison Square Garden, and watched my hometown Kansas City Chiefs do the impossible. They were down 24-0 to the Houston Texans. For my entire life, they have lost that game in humiliating fashion, but this time, they stole the lead by halftime and won by 20 points. Two days later, I flew home after my grandfather died. Three weeks after that, I watched my grandmother jump for joy as the Chiefs won the Super Bowl for the first time in 50 years. We hugged each other as the Chiefs were covered in glory — the first time we’d witnessed our team, the foundation of our relationship, as champions together. It was the first time she’d smiled since her husband’s death.
Millions of moments, millions of stories, just like that were born across New York City when the Knicks did the impossible by besting the San Antonio Spurs in the 2026 NBA Finals.
Everything is bigger and better in New York City, but the Knicks stitched America’s biggest (and greatest) city into a tight-knit community throughout their magic carpet ride of a championship run. Nothing in the world feels simultaneously so singular and so universal as when sports align with the stars.
“Being a fan of a losing team is, at its core, romantic,” Charlotte Wilder wrote. “You love this thing that doesn’t really know you exist, will never love you back, is capable of bringing you intense joy and misery, and is usually loaded with nostalgia. The longer your team goes without winning a championship, the more romantic your fandom. Extra romance points if your team has recently gotten close and lost or has just totally sucked for a very long time.”
By that metric, this Knicks championship run was the next great romance novel.
There was the 51-point scorcher deluge to close out the Atlanta Hawks.
The 30-point soul-snatcher in Philadelphia to eliminate the 76ers.
The 22-point fourth-quarter comeback to steal Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals from the Cleveland Cavaliers, then the 37-point victory to complete the sweep and return to the Finals for the first time since 1999.
From April 25 onward, the Knicks went 15-1, including a multi-record-breaking 13-game winning streak.
That one loss came when Donald Trump tried to make it about himself — attending (and falling asleep during) Game 3 of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden.
Two days later, the Knicks returned this moment to the people.
The San Antonio Spurs held a 27-point lead at halftime of Game 4, leading by as many as 29 points. We’d hit the part of the romance novel where the fairytale is threatened by reality.
The hard-earned doubt crept in, and I’d started to do the one thing you never want to do in romance or sport: rationalize.
This makes sense. It was all too good to be true. Maybe it’s poetic this way, right? A reminder that you can’t erase 27 years, and, really, 53 years, of agony with a 13-game winning streak. That the good and bad are always intertwined, and you just have to hope that, maybe once in your lifetime, the stars align to make it feel fleetingly like the rest never happened and nothing bad will ever happen again.
And then OG Anunoby, the ultimate man of the people dominating in Skechers (!), soared through the lane and tipped in the game winner with 1.2 seconds left to seal a 29-point comeback, the largest in NBA Finals history — an instant elixir for any lingering scar tissue. These Knicks said forget your poetry; this is our destiny. Screw odds, this is our year. Patience? We’ve waited long enough. Jalen Brunson took fate into his own hands and scored 45 of the Knicks’ 94 points in Game 5 to cement the Knicks as champions for the first time in 53 years and breathe unprecedented life into New York.
They inspired Mayor Zohran Mamdani, surrounded by children in Knicks jerseys, to repeal kids’ bedtimes for the NBA Finals — a series that averaged 20.6 million viewers on television and generated a record 15-plus billion views across social media. A series that saw the Knicks become the first team since 1971 to overcome a 10-plus point deficit in every Finals game. A series that turned New York hustlers into bronze statues, all while somehow humanizing them even more.
Since hoisting the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy, they’ve been everywhere. They’re populating every talk show. They’re throwing out the first pitch at the Yankees game. Their faces are painted or printed on every available surface, projected on the side of a building while thousands of euphoric New Yorkers — on the street, fire escape, or balcony — belt out JAY-Z’s “Empire State of Mind” featuring Alicia Keys. They’re selling out all Knicks-related merchandise, setting an all-time Fanatics record. They’re the subjects of an upcoming Ben Stiller-directed Knicks documentary, and, according to Timothée Chalamet, loom larger than winning an Oscar.
They are heroes, your favorite celebrity’s favorite celebrities, rolling down the Canyon of Heroes, but they just want to be one of us.
“This is a testament to them,” Karl-Anthony Towns said of Knicks fans after the epic Game 4. “The great resiliency, the way of New York. “Anyone who lives in New York knows, if you want to make it in this city, you gotta be OK with getting it out the mud. We did that tonight.”
“We don’t really talk about it, but the weight of that jersey — the expectations, the pressure of that jersey,” Josh Hart said. “Right now, it’s the lightest it’s ever felt.”
“I’ve always said this: The amount of love I’ve gotten from this fan base and from this city since day one [...] I’m so honored to be able to put New York across my chest,” Brunson, the 2026 NBA Finals MVP, said. “I wouldn’t trade that feeling for anything in the world.”
They are everywhere.
And yet, you can’t get enough of them because, up until now, you were led to believe you would occupy the doldrums and like it. You can’t look away because you still wonder if they’re real. If this is a fever dream. You had erased this possibility from your mind completely out of self-defense. It hurt too much to picture it. But now that the dormant hope is alive and coursing through every vein , you feel mandated to hold onto it. You cannot fathom having to wait another year — let alone 53 years — to experience nirvana, but you would suffer it all over again now that you’ve felt the sweet relief of healing. Together.
Towns visited “Late Night with Seth Meyers” on June 16 and Meyers admitted that his first impression of Anunoby, Brunson, Hart, and Towns in 2024 was that “you’re such nice people that I actually thought, like, ‘I don’t think they have what it takes.’”
Meyers added, “You seem like a group that never turned on each other; you never saw you guys lose faith in each other. And the journey I went on is, I’m like, you know what? Niceness can win.”
“The power of friendship!” Towns quipped.
“There was a lot of healing that went on in this playoff run — for the fans, for the alumni, and even for me personally,” said the New Jersey kid who grew up loving the Knicks because his mother loved them and won it all in a Knicks jersey six years after he lost her. “To see my grandmother, my mom’s mom, there at the games and to just see the love she had. It’s been a tough couple of years for her as a mother, losing your daughter. But for her to see that moment, and for me, finally, for one of the few times recently, I’ve seen her smile.”
His last sentence transported me back to that living room, watching decades of pain wash from my grandmother’s face six and a half years ago. The Chiefs have won two more Super Bowls since 2020, but nothing compares to witnessing the end of a drought, the breakthrough of human spirit bucking against historical precedent.
Millions of New Yorkers can’t wipe that smile off their faces now. Some of them are from die-hard, lifelong Knicks fans who can’t believe they lived long enough to be the lucky ones. Some don’t particularly care about basketball but love this team as a source of happiness and pride. Some just wanted a portal out of America’s unending darkness — a reason to feel good about something for one night, for one week, for as long as they can stretch it.
This won’t last forever. It’s not supposed to. Over the past eight years, eight different NBA fan bases have occupied this mountaintop. But behind every smile and every story of the night the Knicks did the impossible are emotions and memories waiting to be revisited eternally, ready to remind you that there’s always hope for next year.
Megan Armstrong is a freelance journalist, podcast producer, and perpetual content consumer. Her work has appeared in Billboard, Boardroom, Esquire, GQ, GRAMMY.com, NYLON, Teen Vogue, The Kansas City Star, The Hollywood Reporter, UPROXX, and elsewhere.
But they're still going to the White House. That shows no class to me. Let the owner of the Knicks go there by himself.
You know, i.e. any student of history and politics knows, that democracy is threatened when sports success becomes an antidote to social trouble. This is what Roman Empire was built on, and this is what all non-democratic societies thrive on - a clear correlation: less democracy = more sports celebrations. And of course, the insurrectionist-in chief, the war monger who spreads ICE terror on American cities, celebrates heartily and our great heroes the Knicks go happily visit the fascist on his throne. And the Contrarian, that is supposed to fight for democracy,, is there to glorify what is simply a sports victory, not an antidote to anything - if anything, it is a way of making sure people stay silent about fascism.