What would happen if, for one night, all the rules and norms that govern society went out the window? Star Trek asked the question back in 1967. The Purge updated the premise for modern times in 2013. But Saturday night in New York provided the closest thing to a real-life answer.
New Yorkers climbed lampposts and streetlights. They commandeered any vehicle with four or more wheels. Bus drivers turned into Broadway performers. Glass bottles were strewn everywhere. Even masked vigilantes rode through the streets or surveilled the mayhem from above. Elmo’s traitorous head was put on a pike and paraded around town.
In the span of a few hours, the one law that has governed New York basketball for the past 53 years was flipped on its head. The Knicks won their first championship since 1973, erasing decades of futility and frustration with an eruption of pure, unbridled euphoria. It really was a Purge—in the best way.
At Frost Bank Center in San Antonio, Jalen Brunson and his triumphant teammates raised the Larry O’Brien Trophy in enemy territory, surrounded by devoted supporters who’d made the journey to witness the long-awaited accomplishment in person. And more than 1,500 miles away, New Yorkers flooded the streets in celebration. Corners across the city transformed into impromptu block parties where friends and strangers belted New York’s many anthems at the top of their lungs. The crowd in Times Square surpassed that of a New Year’s Eve ball drop and was laced with a feral energy capable of either delighting or terrifying any unsuspecting tourists. Knicks fans rushed to visit Madison Square Garden, navigating blockades and police just to see the historic venue in all its newfound glory.
Saturday night was the most joyous and unifying event that I’ve ever experienced in this city. Growing up in New York in the mid-’90s, I saw many major sports franchises win plenty of championships, but nothing has reached the level of fervor that consumed the city when the destiny of “Knicks in Four Five” was fulfilled.
The Knicks’ Finals victory over the Spurs put an end to one of the longest title droughts in American sports. The franchise dates all the way back to 1946, yet this is just its third title—a number that seems quaint beside the Yankees’ 27 World Series rings. Decades of pain and pride planted the seeds for so many loyalists, bandwagoners, and casuals to harvest. In a city that never sleeps, it was the teamwork, grit, and unwavering resolve of these Knicks that captured the hearts and minds of so many New Yorkers.
“This city feels like the nation’s largest city has become the world’s smallest town, all of us thinking about the same thing,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani told ABC News on Sunday. “It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen as a New Yorker. I was reading a piece this morning that wrote about [how] oftentimes in our city’s history, this kind of unity comes in a moment of tragedy, and it’s so beautiful that this unity is coming from a moment of joy.”
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The sentiment befits a charismatic politician, sure, but it’s an apt description of the scene in New York as of late—and on Saturday more than ever. The city was already livelier than usual, with the first weekend of the World Cup coinciding with Game 5 of the Finals. I went to a bar at the edge of Fort Greene, in Brooklyn, four hours before tipoff to secure a table at a spot near Habana Outpost, the host of the borough’s most famous Finals watch party, only to find that I had been bested by more committed stakeouts.
So I retreated to another bar near Downtown Brooklyn in time for the Brazil-Morocco match and, then, to watch Game 5 with friends and my older brother, who’s told me countless tales of Michael Jordan making him cry as a teenager and of the gutting feeling of watching the Spurs celebrate on the sacred hardwood in the Garden. All the years I spent watching the Knicks stumble with him, my parents (who have held season tickets since the early ’90s), and my late brother, who died just a few years before Linsanity, have turned this long-suffering franchise into an inseparable part of my identity.
On Saturday, I cheered and chanted alongside strangers—although I was mostly too nervous to do anything but clench my teeth as Brunson led the Knicks on yet another late-game comeback. We got emotional when Patrick Ewing embraced Karl-Anthony Towns, who took on Ewing’s mantle as the franchise’s center and finished off the Hall of Famer's mission. And we expelled the nervous energy built up over years of meltdowns and missed opportunities, jumping in a room mostly full of comrades whom I will never see again.
By about half past midnight, the party had carried me back to Fort Greene, which was still vibrating in a post-win frenzy. Fireworks exploded in the street bordering Fort Greene Park as waves of parading cars honked in harmony with cheering pedestrians. In the quiet stretches away from the crowds, small groups and solitary fans watched from brownstone stoops in a tranquil state of bliss, still primed to acknowledge every passerby with a dutiful “Let’s go, Knicks!”
The roads surrounding FancyFree, a popular sports bar that neighbors Spike Lee’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, were so full that buses had to crawl through a sea of revelers, who greeted them with reassuring slaps and rounds of applause. Ice cream trucks never stood a chance. It seemed like the entire city was there, at least until we encountered more and more Knicks fans in the next swath of crowded sidewalks; I ran into a high school classmate and another friend, and we traded accounts of Brunson’s 45-point masterpiece, our prevailing disbelief, and our pride in the glory being restored to New York City basketball.
Around the corner at Habana Outpost, the scene had been so crowded that the bar had to temporarily halt its projection of the game because viewers were spilling out onto Fulton Street, creating safety concerns. Hours later, lingering fans perched on top of stationary buses, posing for photos and dancing beneath the watchful gaze of Comandante Biggie.
Next, we hopped on the subway to make the pilgrimage to the mecca of basketball: MSG. The A train was filled with orange and blue shirts, jerseys, and hats as Knicks fans commuted either back home or to the night’s next destination. The moment we stepped off the train at 34th Street–Penn Station, I saw a woman squatting beside a trash can and pissing into the subway tracks, laughing maniacally as her friend hyped her up. It wasn’t exactly the romantic image I had envisioned upon my arrival to Madison Square Garden, yet it was fitting; sometimes you need to just cleanse the system—just ask the Knicks.
By then, the crowds on the street had thinned out from the official Plaza33 watch party, which had been the city’s rowdiest throughout the playoffs, until security measures were raised to meet the intensifying postseason celebrations and eventually a visit from a certain political figure who may or may not have been responsible for the Knicks’ only loss since late April. But hours after the end of Game 5, droves of fans were still arriving to pay their respects at the entrance of the Garden.
After making one last stop at a bar to meet a group of friends who had been in Times Square for Sidetalk’s triumphant victory lap, I returned to a subway car filled with Knicks fans, swaying passengers, and a fight brewing among a group of teenagers. The latter was a microcosm of the energy fueling the night’s more destructive undertones. In total, 63 arrests were made in connection with the Knicks game, according to the New York Police Department; five school buses were lit on fire in Times Square; five police cars were damaged on Sixth Avenue; a 17-year-old was shot in the foot; almost a dozen NYPD officers were injured; and four slashings or stabbings occurred. But on the whole, the night felt more like a euphoric exorcism of Knicks demons than any sort of crime spree.
By the next morning, areas like Times Square had already been mostly cleared of any evidence of the previous night’s festivities. (Shout-out to the hardworking members of New York’s Department of Sanitation.) But the celebrations are far from over. On Sunday, the Brooklyn-born Jose Alvarado returned home as a guest of honor at the Puerto Rican Day Parade, standing shoulder to shoulder with Mamdani and teammate Jordan Clarkson. Spike Lee returned from San Antonio and held a block party in Fort Greene. On Monday, OG Anunoby was on another planet during a Good Morning America taping. And on Thursday, the full Knicks squad will ride together down the Canyon of Heroes in Lower Manhattan during the franchise’s first ticker-tape parade en route to City Hall, where they’ll receive keys to the city from the mayor. Mitchell Robinson will even get the chance to show off his beloved truck to the adoring crowds in person.
It may take some time for this new reality to sink in for a fan base that has been conditioned for failure for so long. But the steady crescendo of the Knicks’ epic postseason run—from the 22-point comeback to kick off the Eastern Conference finals to OG Anunoby’s Right Hand of God to the closing act of Brunson’s masterful fourth-quarter heroics—and its grand finale will forever endure as the night an entire city lived out a dream that was generations in the making.
