I woke the other day to a text from Collin Loring, a friend and one of my favorite Knicks writers, asking, “How does the championship still not feel real?” Good question. Here are three theories.
IT’S SOMETHING YOU ATE
In August of 1951, doctors in and around Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, were confronted with a tsunami of locals becoming violently ill all at once. Their initial symptoms — nausea, chills, diarrhea — progressed to convulsions and hallucinations. One man decided he was an airplane, jumped out a second-story window and died. A mother’s 11-year-old son tried to strangle her. Turned out an unscrupulous baker bought some shady flour infested with a fungus whose effects resemble those of LSD.
We know our planet grows increasingly hostile to most of the life it supports (you know why). We know there’s been a steep drop in food regulation the past few years. While you’re reading this, half the country is on the toilet care of corruption and cyclosporiasis. Maybe seven weeks ago there was a hallucinogenic fungus in your Cheerios. Or you ate a three-egg omelette and only two of ‘em were good eggs. Someone might’ve spiked the raw milk and infected us all with Mad Wow disease, deluding ourselves into thinking the Knicks won the title. Moo.
Think about it. The most dominant run of play in THE LITERAL ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE NBA? And the greatest and arguably second-greatest comebacks in playoff history?! And Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby morphing into Michael Jordan, Nikola-Jokić-meets-Kevin-Durant and Kawhi Leonard?!? Evel Knievel thinks that’s over the top.
YOU’RE NOT BUILT TO COMPREHEND IT
On Wednesday I woke and opened the curtains to a dusty orange sky. I closed them. Hard to breathe on the orange days. Harder on Thursday, when skies were mostly blue but the air reeked of burning. On Saturday we got our second “100-year storm” in 10 days. Spent eight hours baling water and sewage out of a flooded basement. Thankfully didn’t lose the hot water heater like last time. Lost the furnace then, too. Mighta lost it again.
Climate change, at least for me, now, is all at once grounded and surreal. While the new normal feels increasingly normal, it’s hard to shake the old one. When I was a kid in western New York, we could go a whole summer not hitting 90 degrees and it’d snow anytime from October to May. Now the heat index tops 100 for days and there’s rarely if ever a white Christmas.
The Knicks are champions of the world. Their Finals MVP conducted a closeout game that sits at the same table with the best of Clyde, Magic, Michael and Giannis. They did it while out-dominating the ’90s Bulls, the Shaq/Kobe Lakers, the Hamptons Five Warriors and the ‘90s Bulls. Yes, I listed them twice; if you lived through that time you understand why I’ll never get tired of writing it.
I watched it happen! I know that it’s real. Still, I have no frame of reference for such a dramatic shift. What once grounded me no longer exists; what grounds me now is something alien. Linsanity made more sense. Doctor said to take two Wemby fails and see how I feel in the morning.
NOTHING IS REAL AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT
The last possibility is surely the darkest, and comes from a story I read once and could never forget, though I have never been able to remember who wrote it or find it since. Read on at your peril.
A man closes his eyes and dies. When he opens them, he is back in his house, with his loved ones. He doesn’t remember dying. Everything inside the house is so familiar, so mundane and perfect, down to the smallest detail, that he simply slips back into everyday life, as it were, as if nothing has changed. That evening, he opens a drawer in search of a key and realizes something is missing from inside the drawer. But he can’t remember what.
The next day, it happens again, this time a book from a shelf. The next it’s a bottle of wine, saved for a special occasion, though he can’t say what it was. Every day, something new disappears, and he can never remember what.
Then one day, one of his children is gone. He suspects it, knows deep inside something is terribly wrong, but he has no memory of them; just the brutal, unspeakable awareness that he can’t properly mourn whomever he’s lost. The next day it’s another child. The next it’s his wife.
The revelation at the end is that the man is in Hell, suffering through this pattern over and over, forever. Maybe Swedenborg wrote the story. Maybe no one did; maybe it’s mine. I can’t remember.
Remember this?
What if Hart missed that bunny, and the Knicks went on to lose Game 4 by one? And then the series? What if we’re is Hell? And we’ve all forgotten that he missed, and reality seems to carry on as normal, only little things keep on disappearing. Mitchell Robinson. Brunson’s healthy left wrist. Maybe Jeremy Sochan. Maybe Chris Jent.
So, in summation: maybe we’re hallucinating. Maybe the world stopped adding up long before we learned math. Maybe we’re damned. Either way, the Knicks are NBA champions. Whatever this is, don’t wake me.
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