For a few weeks now, strange things have been happening in New York City.<\/p>\n
Eye contact on the train is intentional, warm, knowing. Terriers in team sweaters sniff terriers without team sweaters suspiciously, triple-checking their loyalties.<\/p>\n
Drivers honk with joy and not rage (sometimes), as if flagging down old friends on some Rockwellian Main Street, shouting through open windows at sidewalk splotches of orange and blue \u2014 the least melodic performance on Broadway, and the likeliest to move grown men to tears anyway:<\/p>\n
\u201cKNIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICKSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!\u201d<\/p>\n
Strange things are happening in New York City because strange things happen to New York City when the Knicks are good.<\/p>\n
For decades, it has been easy to forget this, seeing as the Knicks have been mostly not good \u2014 so consistently and convincingly lifeless that perma-despair seemed utterly normal.<\/p>\n
And because it has been so long since the Knicks were this good at the city\u2019s game \u2014 27 years since they last made the N.B.A. finals, 32 since they had an honest chance to win it all, 53 since they actually did so \u2014 generations of basketball fans are learning and relearning core truths about themselves and their electric, maddening, merrily hypocritical, suddenly-less-cynical home.<\/p>\n
When the Knicks are good, the city shrinks, deliriously, into the biggest small town in the world \u2014 if small towns had to outlaw watch parties<\/a> outside their own team\u2019s arena because the police feared the consequences of high-density delirium.<\/p>\n When the Knicks are good, signs go up in the windows of the good bodegas and the bad bodegas and the cannabis shops and the eight-figure luxury apartments guarded by doormen now convening discussion sessions about Karl-Anthony Towns whenever anyone enters the lobby.<\/p>\n When the Knicks are good, it is right and appropriate and cringe-less to cluster outside Brooklyn bars singing \u201cNew York, New York,\u201d an earnest anthem<\/a> for emotionally vulnerable times; to know that Walt Frazier, the octogenarian star of the last title team, is still the most stylish man<\/a> in these streets; to arrange for the family vehicle to be serviced at John Starks Kia in Queens, named for the beloved 1990s not-quite-hero<\/a> from the last time New York cared so much about all this.<\/p>\n When the Knicks are good, the city\u2019s flimsiest tropes crumble under scrutiny.<\/p>\n New York is meant to be unflappable, implacable, above it all. This New York is flapped, highly placable, above nothing \u2014 with the notable exception of every team the Knicks have played for a month and a half.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re going to need the National Guard!\u201d a man hollered, almost aspirationally, the night they made the finals, edging toward Madison Square Garden to join the Midtown masses in a spirit of light misdemeanor, walking among lampposts that probably should have been greased to discourage exuberant climbers.<\/p>\n The cheapest resale tickets for the next game in that building would soon be available for the preposterous, plausible price of more than $3,000 apiece<\/a>.<\/p>\n Of course, New York has many teams in many sports that stir many unruly passions. Fans of Rangers hockey are avowed lunatics, but have a smaller footprint in a city where a public park\u2019s netless hoop is something of an unofficial municipal logo. Baseball and football allegiances are split \u2014 Mets and Yankees, Jets and Giants \u2014 preventing even the most charmed playoff run from becoming a wholly unifying moment.<\/p>\n There is also, witnesses insist, another N.B.A. team that plays in Brooklyn, in the same arena where the Liberty won a W.N.B.A. title two years ago. But most New Yorkers have collectively agreed not to talk about the Nets, whose home games against their Manhattan rivals are generally more hospitable to \u2014 you know.<\/p>\n