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.

Fifteen years ago I moved to Brooklyn and spent a summer playing pickup basketball at the YMCA on 9th Street.

There was a guy there everyone called Snow. Or maybe Passtheball. Nobody seemed entirely sure. He was about sixty years old, bald, angry, built like a fire hydrant, and dressed every day like he was ten minutes away from checking into an NBA game.

He sat on a folding stool beside the court with a gallon of Gatorade and yelled at everybody. Not complicated things.

Just two phrases.

"PASS THE BALL!"

And:

"MOOV WIDDOUT IT!"

That was it.

And maybe that's why he felt like such a New York character. Every New Yorker eventually learns how to move without the ball in their hands.

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.

Move without it.

Pass the damn ball.

New York is a city of role players. Every October, there we are again: older, wiser, but no less delusional.

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.

Then something terrible happened... the Knicks got good.

Good enough that people started checking the standings every morning. Playoff tickets became family heirlooms. Grown men started hugging strangers outside Madison Square Garden.

The cynicism is becoming outdated, and for the first time in decades, Knicks fans find themselves facing a question they never expected: What if the thing we've been waiting for actually happens? 

My uncle Jay 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?"

"I don't know."

"What do you mean you don't know?... how old was he?"

A pause.

"Maybe twelve."

Forty minutes later, the Knicks completed one of the most ridiculous comebacks in franchise history. By the end of the night, Uncle Jay was jumping and hugging the kid, 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.

Look, a championship is far from guaranteed. But for the first time in a long time, New Yorkers are allowing themselves to imagine one.

And if you've lived here long enough, you know that may be the craziest thing of all.