The sounds coming out of me were causing the sleeping baby to stir, so I had to remove myself from the premises. But I had just seen the hand of god steal Game 4 in the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history, giving the New York Knicks a 3-1 series lead, and I was in a city full of fellow witnesses making similarly feral sounds.
Earlier in the fourth quarter, while the San Antonio Spurs' lead over the Knicks hovered around 15, I laid catatonic on the sofa during a timeout; my wife was threatening to tell my friends that I had almost drifted asleep during my team's Finals run. At that juncture, I was mentally steeling myself for a tied series and trying to look at the bright spots in this loss: Jalen Brunson finally found some freedom, and the dual point guard lineups I'd clamored for allowed Jose Alvarado to shoulder some of the ball-handling. Soon enough I was on all fours, slapping the floor, laughing hysterically. There was movement on the baby monitor.
Cans from the fridge, then off into the howling night. I have been watching every game of this series in my own home, sober as OG Anunoby in a franchise-altering moment, too anxious to enter society. My broadcast stream Wednesday night had a tiny delay. Until I turned up the sound on my TV to mask it, the ambient roar of my city kept giving me a sneak preview of future elation—which is fun, like how people might read the Wikipedia entry for a horror movie they’re about to watch. Clawing out of a 29-point hole is basically a horror movie in reverse.
But now that the Knicks had won, 107-106, and the screens were off, all of New York City was perfectly in sync. The chief beauty of this place is that everyone cares about freakishly different stuff; as it turns out, it's also beautiful if everyone briefly cares about the exact same stuff. Strangers trickling down the sidewalk dapped me up and clinked cans. Bikers flitted by me, screaming into the void. Weird salutations and gesticulations came at me from all angles as Knicks fans worked out their residual adrenaline. The brutal humidity of the early evening had broken, leaving the night clear and cool, unlike the minds filling it up.
As I walked north to congregate with more of my people, enjoying all the stoops and trees painted red and blue by sirens, my thoughts went back to Anunoby, as they will perhaps for decades to come. Earlier this week, I was telling my coworkers about the strange workings of fandom: A man I had previously perceived as a boring cog on someone else's team had become, over the course of two years, my favorite player on my favorite team. One day you wake up and you're considering getting a laconic three-and-D player’s image tattooed onto your own flesh, and as hard as you might try to trace the journey that took you there, no retelling will do it justice. These are the serpentine paths of fandom.
What a revelation OG Anunoby has been in these Finals: the audacious late-clock shotmaking in Game 3, the kaiju-style encounters between him and Victor Wembanyama in the two previous games. Jab-step pull-up three right in that beast’s eye. Wemby will close out too hard, and OG slashes past him with those long, immovable strides, punctuated with the only finish that couldn't be menaced by an outstretched tentacle: that sturdy two-footed dunk.
For a fandom so volatile, hapless, and conditioned to expect our own suffering, Anunoby has been a balm. I don't know what I love most: his bluntness, his corner threes, his economy of language, his help defense, his icy fixation on the goal ahead. "It feels cool," he said, after minting the most iconic shot in the history of a basketball-loving city with a population of 8.5 million people. "I mean, everyone's pretty excited. I'm excited, too." That was all he said before pivoting to the need to win one more.
Exactly what I expected from my guy. Leave the lunacy to us civilians on the streets; the Knicks are going back to San Antonio in hopes of finishing the job. "We go as far as OG takes us," I wrote on May 2 in my group chat of childhood Knicks buddies. What if the answer is all the way?
This possibility was front of mind as chants of "OG, OG, OG" lit up the little slice of Fort Greene near Spike Lee’s studio, an area which has unexpectedly turned into a sports mecca for adjoining neighborhoods. The last time I’d walked through here, I'd seen scores of sullen Gooners slinking onto mass transit on the day of Arsenal's loss in the Champions League final, but this night was its spiritual opposite. Cop car sirens couldn't cut through the viscosity of the Knicks chants, and the officers milled around placidly in the midst of a thousand open containers, making small talk with the mellower revelers. I wove around camera crews trying to harvest vertical videos from the spectacle. As befits our time, everyone wanted to both live in and document the moment, but I was also struck by how present these Knicks fans were, how forcefully the delight of that comeback seized everyone's attention. How can you look at your phone when you could talk to a guy nearby who looks sort of rabid and has thoughts about Cleanthony Early? If you'd rather not, you can turn to someone else and discuss literally anything—credit unions or Louise Glück or the specific nasty aromas of local bars, as I did, because this is a city where all that is doable in the span of a single block at 1:30 a.m.
New Yorkers of all ages and tax brackets were shuffling around, trying to make sense of what they had just seen on a Wednesday evening. Some dangled out of fire escapes to watch the fracas below. Cameras flashed as their subjects posed, pouted, and flexed. My favorite convenience store was being raided for six-packs, as brown-baggers melded easily with the crowds flowing out of bars. I walked into the middle of Lafayette Avenue, which had been constricted into a tiny corridor that allowed one or two cars to inch ahead every few minutes, flanked by teeming bodies. One driver blasted "Empire State of Mind" and thrust an orange foam finger out the driver's side window, to heroic reception. One car produced so many jubilant hands shooting up through the sunroof, and I couldn't count to see if there were any left over to hold the steering wheel, but that wasn't a priority at a time like this. Big commercial vans had their sides slapped, spanked, and slammed. Some solitary drivers glowered at the congealed mass slowing down their trip. One goon in a Yankees hat whispered "Spurs in 7," but his vehicle was moving too slowly to evade a woman who acrimoniously air-humped it from behind while flipping a double bird. The crowd pealed.
How could one night contain all this—joy, but also the recent memory of despair? How can a night of the NBA Finals begin with substantial Ariel Hukporti minutes and still culminate in bliss? Wu-Tang Clan was at Madison Square Garden at halftime, dutifully trying to rile up the faithful despite a 27-point deficit, and just two quarters later "C.R.E.A.M" was blaring out of New York City vehicles in jubilation. How'd we get away with it, anyway? When Karl-Anthony Towns, whom I had just praised for rare discipline, picked up his first two fouls within the first minute of the game, I told my wife that it was all over, yet it was his fingertips that broke up the Spurs' last inbound pass of regulation that might’ve otherwise led to a fatal dunk.
By the end, it was so difficult to make sense of how we'd felt at the start. In the first half of the game, the Spurs hit the apex of their hyper-modern, multi-guard, flame-throwing offense; in the second half, they looked like they'd been scooped out of a 1970s ABA game and cruelly teleported into the future. Every story of a comeback this great is also a story of collapse, and theirs was catastrophic. For every cunning Jose Alvarado maneuver, there was a frenzied Spurs brick. Nothing looked reliable. In some very distant NBA Finals, we may see Wemby score as many points in a single half as his whole team mustered in the second half of Game 4: 30.
I didn't hear many people talk about Wembanyama on the streets, although it appears someone targeted him with an egg-like projectile. My own experience in this series is one of awe rather than negativity toward him, even if the flying kick at Anunoby's ligaments is challenging my stance. Having to beat him is half the fun. Victor Wembanyama is magnificent and unsolvable, and it's much cooler to pursue a title by going straight through a titan on the eve of his takeover.
When I finally calmed down and could no longer hear my heart in my ears, and the throngs had mostly dissipated so that people could squeeze in a few hours of sleep, I headed home, too. On my way I saw a lone man shuffling down the center of the street in a way that instinctually kicked me into alertness. Typically the mumbling from such a figure would be unintelligible. The events of this night instead bent his private reverie into a much more familiar shape.
"Knicks in five," he said.
"Knicks in five," I said, and continued my journey to bed.
