Best Midlife Crisis Ever: An Unforgettable Day at the Knicks Parade
Confetti. Community. Mayor Mamdani. And so much joy. One writer recounts a whirlwind trip to New York to celebrate the Knicks (and her birthday).Best Midlife Crisis Ever: An Unforgettable Day at the Knicks Parade
Confetti. Community. Mayor Mamdani. And so much joy. One writer recounts a whirlwind trip to New York to celebrate the Knicks (and her birthday).
3 a.m.: I wake up, confused and alone. It is Thursday, June 18, the morning of my 43rd birthday. Like countless others in this situation over the course of history, I have, in the past 24 hours, done something drastic and possibly misguided in an expensive attempt to recapture the vibrancy of my youth. Yesterday, I’d booked a flight from Reno to JFK two hours before takeoff. My whirlwind destination? The one scene I never thought I’d be a part of in my lifetime: downtown Manhattan, on the occasion of a New York Knicks victory parade.
The Knicks are NBA champions (!!!) and the last time that happened, I was negative-10 years old. At this rate, the next Knicks championship ought to be penciled in for 2079, at which point I’ll be turning 96. This opportunity might, mathematically speaking, be now or never.
But enough about my ruminations on the slow death march of time! This is a time of plenty, a time for gratitude and living in the now. This is a time of people coming together in community to say things like: I’m just soooo happy Karl-Anthony Towns is happy! and/or Jalen Brunson is my dad! and/or, most universally, Knicks in five! The time is now.
3:01 a.m.: I snooze the alarm.
3:10 a.m.: I snooze it again. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’ve had a regular night of sleep since watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals in Sweden in an airless hotel conference room during a work retreat with some fellow Ringer sickos. That game started at 2:30 a.m. local time, the sun rose not much later, and my circadian rhythm is still recovering.
3:19 a.m.: I open one eye and look at r/NYKnicks, where someone has mentioned that they’ve arrived at the entrance to one of the parade’s “viewing pens” (was there nothing else the NYPD could call these?) and there are already a fair amount of people waiting in—sorry, on—line. I bolt out of bed.
4:19 a.m.: The cab driver’s eyes widen when I ask to be taken near City Hall. “I’ve just come from down there,” he says, reminding me of that “moon’s haunted” meme. I have him drop me off at Canal Street to save himself and I walk the rest of the way, passing so, so many cop cars and cops. (A reported 10,000 officers were assigned to parade duty.) There are barricades upon barricades everywhere. A few times, I get scolded for winding up on the wrong side of them. Man, it’s too early for this.
4:49 a.m.: I reach the entrance for City Hall Park, the terminus of the parade and the site of the keys-to-the-city ceremony later on. I have a standing-room-only press pass. The media entrance is open between 4 and 8 a.m., and we’ve been advised to try to be there by 5. Having been forged in the cauldron of early-morning lines at the courthouse during the trials of Sams Bankman-Fried and Altman, I’m not taking any chances, and I’m rewarded by smooth passage through security. Many attendees along the parade route who waited for hours before the security screenings that begin at 6 a.m. will not be so lucky.
4:56 a.m.: Inside the gates, I spot my first celebrity, Evan Roberts of WFAN, and approach him to say “Long time listener …” He’s super kind but I can see in his eyes that man, it’s too early for this. He’s wearing a Mets shirt, because he’s never been a Knicks fan and is instead one of the world’s most sticktoitive Nets supporters.
It was only (“only”) like five or 10 years ago that the Nets seemed to be capitalizing on the Knicks’ misfortune, but fortunes change. (P.S.: The Knorth remembers!) Lately, Towns has been repeating a bit about how the Knicks are bringing all the five boroughs together, even Brooklyn—which [dramatic pause] has a whole-ass NBA team …! The people love the bit. (I’m people.)
5:02 a.m.: I can’t stop gazing at City Hall, all lit up and decked out in orange and blue, with the jerseys of each guy on the team hanging proudly on the facade of the building. The glorious starting five, hallowed be thy names, are situated in the middle, with Brunson’s no. 11 in the dead center of everything. It’s an extremely “is this really happening?” sight. (As someone soon points out online, it’s not perfect: the banner for one bottom-of-roster player, Dillon Jones, is up there as no. 33, which is a number Jones has worn before, just not on the Knicks, because it was retired in honor of Patrick Ewing. Can’t win ’em all.)
6:12 a.m.: A colleague writes on a group chat: the crowds/barricades are hellish. I had hoped to spend a few of the wee hours wandering near the parade route and reveling in the chaos, but based on the hectic social media reports I’ve been seeing about clusterfucks at subway stations and viewing pen security bottlenecks, that operation is a clear no-go. The parade will follow the traditional “Canyon of Heroes” route that has been used since the 19th century—a picturesque stretch, but also a very short one; it’s hard to imagine that it can accommodate all the buoyant Knicks fans in the tri-state area (and, like me, beyond). Hectic reports about various entry points begin piling up on social media.
7:03 a.m.: Another text: Whew it’s insane down here.
8:12 a.m.: There’s a group of ushers from Madison Square Garden on hand, in their maroon polo shirts, to work the City Hall event. A nice touch!
8:40 a.m.: A bus full of Department of Sanitation workers drives the wrong way down the parade route and is hailed with thunderous cheers. A nice time!
8:44 a.m.: Trouble in paradise: The assigned seating for print journalists at the City Hall ceremony is, shall we say, obstructed view.
9:34 a.m.: By far the predominant jersey of the day is Brunson’s no. 11. (As someone tweeted last week, it’s so fitting that only a few years ago, Brunson asked Frank Ntilikina’s blessing to wear it—and was right to do so.) I also noticed a lot of Starks, a lot of Sprewells, a good deal of Anthonys, and a big opportunity in the underrepresented Towns market. One guy had on an impressively well-worn Chris Childs no. 1 jersey, which flooded me with memories. Another guy’s said CONEY ISLAND on the nameplate. While taking a photo of a dude wearing a stuffed basketball headpiece, I asked him what it said on the back of his jersey (no. 69). “Oh, just my last name,” he said.
10 a.m.: IT’S GO TIME. I am standing far from Print Siberia, over by the west side of City Hall Park, next to the chipper crowds assembled at the tail end of the parade route on Broadway and Murray. The fans keep streaming in around me, some of them starting to climb anything with a perceived foothold, however sketchy: trees, forklifts, fences. A jumbo screen starts showing footage from down at the parade’s starting point, at Battery Park at the lower tip of Manhattan, where the festivities are beginning.
There’s head coach Mike Brown, whose face elicits, as it will all day long and maybe forever, a menagerie of who-let-the-dogs-out woofs and the seagullish “Mike? Mike? Mike” chirps derived from Finding Nemo and revitalized by Knicks players.
There’s Brunson, striding down the street with his daughter in his arms, his image on the screen prompting “M! V! P!” chants from our corner of the parade. There’s Martha Stewart, because there always is. (Complimentary!) There’s B-roll of fans hanging out of windows above the route, throwing down confetti and Mardi Gras beads. There’s Towns, wearing the loudest and loveliest leather jacket I’ve ever seen and getting dapped up by the cops and letting little kids reach over the barricades to palm the Larry O’Brien Trophy. When John Starks, my ’90s Knicks gateway drug, is shown puffing on a cigar, a few tears roll down my cheek and blur my notes.
10:23 a.m.: A big black SUV is shown onscreen without explanation. “It’s probably Dolan,” someone in the crowd sneers.
10:34 a.m.: Bagpipers! Love bagpipers. (Side note: The Scots drinking the city of Boston out of house and home has been a magnificent World Cup side plot …)
10:36 a.m.: Thriving and driving (because I don’t know what rhymes with “being driven”) in a beautiful vintage vehicle that once carried the Apollo 11 astronauts in their ticker-tape parade, is Walt “Clyde” Frazier, who was on the last championship Knicks teams in 1970 and 1973 and who has been a Knicks color commentator for decades. Far from wearing his usual bespoke tailoring—an enthusiasm that was central to perhaps my favorite Knicks hype video this spring, “The Look,”—Clyde is clad in a splatter-painted Super Mario Sunshine sweatshirt, and looking customarily fly.
10:40 a.m.: I chat with a man named Rashawn Prince, a Knicks fan from Harlem who was one of 600 lucky New Yorkers to win a free ticket to the ceremony in a lotto. 347,000 people submitted entries, but Prince—favorite player: Charles Oakley; favorite moment of the 2026 championship run: that OG Anunoby putback to win Game 4, about which he says, “Dude, it was almost cinematic, like if Martin Scorsese was making a movie, that’s how he’d direct it, you know what I’m saying?”—tells me he had a good feeling he might win a ticket to City Hall. “I always try to keep a positive attitude instead of thinking, like, ‘Oh, I’m not going to get it,’” Prince says. “I just try to put good vibes into the universe.” After that Game 4, I know just how he feels.
11:04 a.m.: As Fat Joe performs from atop a float, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, wearing a Josh Hart jersey with a shirt and tie underneath, hits one hell of a synchronized Lean Back with Towns.
Speaking of Fat Joe—who had occasionally blinded Mike Brown during Game 4, when the glint of Madison Square Garden’s lights reflected off the musician’s jewels, Brown later said—one fun fact I learned during this New York playoff run is that he and I have the same sense of humor. After Game 5, Yahoo’s divine Dan Devine reported a vignette in which the recording artist accepted congratulations on the team’s victory with the quip: “Played a hard one tonight.” Knicks minds think alike! I thought with great satisfaction when I read this, because when I’d woken up on Sunday morning following the Knicks’ Game 5 clinch, most of my text messages looked like this:
4:14 a.m.: Baaakkkeeess congrats!!!! …
5:32 a.m.: Insanity!!!!!!! Congrats bakes!! …
7:35 a.m.: So so cool! Yah Bakes!!
My response: thank you thank you I worked hard and never gave up. This was both sheepish and sincere. Because you know what, I had worked pretty hard, for like 35 years, thankyouverymuch! (See here, here, and here.) And while one could make the argument that in fact I was always kind of giving up on the Knicks, to me even that is a sure sign that I never actually did.
11:07 a.m.: I meet some wheelchair basketball players who have played at halftime of Knicks games, including a woman named Chrissy Lee—favorite Knick: Jalen Brunson—who laughs about her most deluded Knicks optimism in years past: “I thought back in 2017,” she says, “with Amar’e [Stoudemire] and Blake Griffin? I thought that was the all-time dream team.”
11:13 a.m.: I hear my first “6-7!” of the day. It’s also the only one, a welcome sign of societal progress.
11:26 a.m.: The floats have arrived at our location! One has a basketball and a hoop that fans are encouraged to try shooting at. One has the Wu-Tang Clan. One is festooned with bigheads of all the key guys. Another is Mitch Robinson’s personal vehicle.
11:36 a.m.: In addition to jerseys, the crowd is lined with a rich tapestry of T-shirts. One depicts Brunson in the manner of the cartoon dog Bluey. Another says “JALEN FUCKIN’ BRUNSON” on the front and “BITCH, I’M A KNICK” on the back. Ben Stiller is wearing a Towns “Bodega KAT” hype shirt.
And I meet a man wearing a shirt comparing members of the ’70s Knicks to today’s team: Willis Reed to KAT; Clyde to Brunson, etc. The Reverend Dr. Frank Mason (favorite Knick: “it takes a village”) and his old pal Darell Wilson (favorite Knick: “Earl. Black Jesus. Earl the Pearl Monroe”) are both lucky enough to remember the last Knicks’ title. Wilson was going into his freshman year of high school in 1970 and a junior in 1973. “And I’ve been waiting ever since,” he says. “I’ve been waiting ever since.” Now, he says, “I’m going to tell America, and I’m going to tell New York: We’re back.”
11:40 a.m.: One of the signs being carried by people on the parade floats says: THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING. It reminds me of Mike Breen’s final call at the conclusion of the Finals: “Knicks fans, this is not a dream! Go ahead and cry!” Breen, who has called New York basketball for decades, knows a little something about Knicks teams that make fans want to cry—but never like this.
11:51 a.m.: The floats have reached City Hall and the park has filled up with movers and shakers and lotto winners. I spy Fat Joe; Dan Goldman; some guy who makes me think “huh, that kinda looks like Josh Safdie,” and later learn was in fact Josh Safdie; Herb Williams looking exactly the same as he did in the WE WANT HERB! era; Carmelo Anthony wearing a hat with a half-Mets, half-Yankees logo, a likely hat for him to have; John Turturro; and Larry Johnson. Looking for a place to stand that isn’t Print Siberia, I duck behind a pack of people near the back of the crowd inside the park and wind up stationed half an inch away from Tiki Barber, the drive-time WFAN radio cohost with Roberts, for the next hour while the two of them are live on air. Whatta town.
11:52 a.m.: I see online that Josh Hart’s wife, Shannon, has given him a taste of his own medicine with the ol’ thumb-in-the-butt. (During the Larry O’Brien Trophy presentation after Game 5, Hart had gotten’ Brunson good with the surprise maneuver.) As Hart pointed out on a podcast in 2024, these New York Knicks are fueled by “the power of friendship.” But this video? That’s the power of romance. I love love!!!!!!!!
12:20 p.m.: Welp, I’m crying. What caused the waterworks was seeing Breen up on the podium on the steps of City Hall as the ceremony’s emcee, and then, as if that weren’t enough, watching a video chronicling the team’s romp through the playoffs that included one of the all-time Breen calls, on the occasion of Brunson hitting a 3 over Wemby late in the fourth quarter of Game 4’s comeback from down 29 points: “Brunson fires up a 3 PUTS IT IN! ONE-POINT GAME!! tHiS bUiLdInG iS sHaKiNg RIGHT NOW!!!!” and oh no, now I’m crying again.
12:40 p.m.: Mayor Mamdani gives a soaring speech that is part voice-of-the-fan nitty-gritty Knicks history, part hyperlocal New York pride, and all heart. If you bet that both Toney Douglas and Langston Galloway would get some love in a Knicks championship ceremony, drinks are on you next time! If you hoped that people like Julius Randle (who helped bring the Knicks to respectability before being traded away in 2024 for KAT) and Tom Thibodeau (who was fired as head coach after the Knicks lost the Eastern Conference finals in Game 7 to the Pacers last season) would get their flowers on a stage like this, you’re in luck! (Mamdani also pointedly shouted out Charles Oakley.)
Mamdani talks about New York being “overcome by happiness” and about people watching Knicks games from fire escapes and through store windows. He notes that the Knicks had a 99.6 percent chance to lose Game 4 and send the series back to San Antonio tied 2-2—but that the other 0.4 percent is what New York is all about: “It’s in that 0.4 percent that we go to work,” the mayor says. He quotes Jalen Brunson’s line from after that crazy victory: “You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario,” Brunson said then, “but you’ve got to go out there and do something about it.” In conclusion, Mamdani says that the Knicks didn’t win for New York (anyone else hear this in their head?) but rather like New York.
12:48 p.m.: “Fuck them picks!” a man yells, as is the custom, when Mikal Bridges is shown on the screen wearing a no. 4 Knicks jersey turned backward to show the name of his young French teammate Pacome Dadiet. (Some conspiratorial types point out that the Spurs’ De’Aaron Fox wears no. 4, and that Victor Wembenyama is French.) Bridges has emerged as the unlikely MVP of the title celebration period; I’ve never been as captivated by someone “going live” as I was with his Monday afternoon sesh. Who knew Bridges had that much dog in—and also with—him?
12:49 p.m.: Someone in the crowd is carrying a giant poster of Wemby’s anguished face.
12:50 p.m.: Jim Dolan gets up to the mic and is audibly boo’d, hahahahahah [takes deep breath] hahahahaha. As the artist Andrew Kuo remarked during the Finals, for fans seeking a title, the final boss/big bad, wasn’t in fact Wembenyama, or the Spurs—it was the Knicks owner, who managed to live down to his reputation. Ahead of Game 3, Dolan turned the first Finals game at Madison Square Garden in 27 years (this is neither here nor there, but Dolan began amassing control of the Knicks from his dad … 27 years ago; really makes you think) into an awkward space when he invited the president to come sit/snooze next to him. Before Game 4, Dolan also engaged in a petty tete-a-tete with Mayor Mamdani over watch party permits that involved a WFAN hit and crescendoed with an official MSG press release titled “MAYOR MAMDANI AND POLICE COMMISSIONER TISCH ARE NEW YORK CITY’S BIGGEST PARTY POOPERS.” All that said, some people seemed to have liked Dolan’s pep talk to the team prior to the playoffs, in which he reminded players that a win “would be life-changing for all of you” and also suggested that they ought to stop boning for the next 10 weeks as a sacrifice for the cause. So he had that going for him, I guess!
In the afterglow of the Knicks championship victory, Dolan went on the radio to call it “suicidal” for the Knicks to go into the second apron—a proclamation that, if true, would imply that the team will lose players like Landry Shamet and Mitchell Robinson in the offseason.
Here at the ceremony, Dolan just comes across as a vindictive chump more fixated on bigtiming the mayor than on celebrating the occasion. “I don’t need your vote,” he snarks to the fans before him. “I don’t need to quote to you about what happened. If you’re real Knick fans you know it already.” Con…gratulations, I guess?? The same guy in the crowd near me who had shouted “fuck them picks” earlier now cries out: “Charles Oakley!!!” So true.
1 p.m.: After promising on the Jimmy Fallon show that he’d stop, Mike Brown does his requisite “Who Let the Dogs Out?” as Brunson covers his face in secondhand shame.
1:07 p.m.: Keys to the city are given out. Highlights include (A) the pop that Jose Alvarado gets (and his ecstatic I-can’t-believe-this-is-my-life reaction; Hart’s tweet made a good point!) and (B) the size differential in the Towns-Mamdani embrace. Lowlights are (A) when Dolan basically declines to say cheese for the nice photo with the mayor that nearly everyone else has accomplished without incident, and also (B) when Dolan’s nepo-grump son does the same.
1:20 p.m.: Alicia Keys performs “New York State of Mind,” a song that always gets me good—I danced with my dad to that tune at my wedding!—followed by “Empire State of Mind,” a song that gets a bad rap among the tastemakers but that dammit, I enjoy. Seeing Towns throw his head back and holler that first “New York!!” along with us corny fans, for example, heals something within me.
1:28 p.m.: The “Go New York Go New York Go!” song plays, and heals everything within me. Side note: I really enjoyed how during the Finals the MSG jumbotron played the old network introduction, which interpolates the “GNYGNYG” tune. A salve.
1:30 p.m.: CONFETTI! ORANGE AND BLUE CONFETTI! THIS IS NOT A DREAM! THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING. I FEEL LIKE A KID OUT HERE. CONFETTI IN MY PURSE AND ON MY HAT. CONFETTI RULES EVERYTHING AROUND ME (C.R.E.A.M.!) GET THE CONFETTI … THIS IS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE.
1:31 p.m.: And like that, it’s all over, this celebration of an achievement I’d considered impossible. With tears running down my face, I run into the brilliant sportswriter Jayson Buford, who assures me that he’s been crying too. This is the second time we’ve met IRL; the first time being about two hours earlier. We hug and kvell as though we’ve known each other our entire lives, though. Being Knicks fans means that we kinda have.
1:40 p.m.: I run back into Rashawn Prince, the lottery winner I spoke to earlier. He is practically skipping like a schoolgirl, like I am. We agree we’ll meet again—same time, same place next year, baby!
2:14 p.m.: I’m biding some time in an empty conference room in City Hall, where I’m relieved to feel air conditioning and to have an outlet to charge my phone. Out in a nearby hallway, I see Towns walking by with the trophy; I’m not 100 percent sure on the timing, but later I’ll wonder whether maybe he was on his way to record the cutest clip in basketball history. I hear someone shout “Patrick!” and look up in time to see the Big Fella himself walk by, smiling wide.
2:46 p.m.: All right, now I’m interviewing … Mayor Mamdani? I’m truly just as surprised as you are, but I’ve chalked up this unexpected opportunity to one more bit of Knicks fever bringing everybody together. On that note: Normally I wouldn’t be wearing a Knicks ball cap in a mayoral interview setting, but! The combination of what the humidity and occasional light mist has done to my hair all day and the fact that Hizzoner himself is still wearing his Knicks jersey has emboldened me to ignore the voice of my mother in my head.
Mamdani tells me that the biggest Knicks fan he knows is probably his friend Salman, who “seemingly found an excuse to wear a Knicks jersey no matter what the occasion was,” Mamdani says, “and without anything underneath it.” He also shouts out the political strategist Morris Katz, who was even “thinking about the Knicks when it came to our own campaign last year,” Mamdani says. “Just thinking about the idea of the team representing the city.”
I ask Mamdani about the portion of his speech in which he Remembered Some Guys. Fifty-three years is a long drought between championships, he says: “Some of us, that’s longer than we’ve been alive. You are, in some ways, feeling as if you’re born into waiting. And there are all of these moments you look back on, or in the moment, you think: This is it. I remember I was at that game in 2011, Toney Douglas franchise-record 3s in a single game against the Grizzlies, and thinking, like, Wow, this is the moment. And those moments, they build up to this.”
Mamdani untucks a corner of his Knicks jersey to show me an inscription: ONCE A KNICK, ALWAYS A KNICK. “This, to me, is just such a beautiful motto,” he says. “Just trying to honor so many of those incredible players over the years.”
Mamdani was in the Garden for Game 3. He watched the first half of Game 4 in Bed-Stuy, and seeking to shift the juju he relocated to Ridgewood for the second half. “It was like, I gotta get out of here,” he says. “I had to go to a new place, get a new superstition, get a new rhythm.” As for the decisive Game 5, Mamdani was in the Village, where the game was on inside the bar and also projected on a wall across the street. “There was maybe, like, two to three seconds delay,” he says. “And so it felt like you could live once, and you could run out and live it again.”
I bring up that hot-button issue making the rounds on social media: What is the definition of “a New Yorker”? He tells me he has given a “legal answer” to that in the past: “anyone who is a resident of this city.” Then he adds that “the thing that’s so beautiful about this city is that it allows people from all across the world to find a sense of belonging.” He is, he says, mostly interested “in celebrating that so many call themselves New Yorkers, and for many it’s because they found a home where they haven’t elsewhere.”
These are nice answers, but none is as specific, as evocative, as one that he’d given to an earlier question. Talking about his Game 5 experience, with the projector screen on the wall outside the bar, he reminisces on what New York has been like for the past weeks and months: “It’s the TV in the trunk of the car,” he says. “It’s watching it on LinkNYC. It’s pulling up to the station and the train conductor singing about the team.” He’s excited to continue the party during the rest of the World Cup, and not just for the overseas tourists. “I can't wait also for New Yorkers to rediscover their own city. Because there is a temptation to live life in the city the way you've been living it for years. You go to the same places. You don't leave the same set of neighborhoods that you've grown up in. And now, in this moment? It's a chance to see the city anew.” At the end of the interview, reminded by an aide, the Mayor of New York City wishes me a happy birthday. I have to remind myself for the umpteenth time: THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING.
3:10 p.m.: When I walk out of City Hall, everything feels like a dream, by which I mean that everything feels like the parts in Inception in which the architecture of the fantasy world starts collapsing. Department of Sanitation workers are everywhere—just as N.Y. calls the cops “New York’s Finest” and the fire department “New York’s Bravest,” the sanitation workers are officially known as “New York’s Strongest”—each of them doing something that you’d see in the pages of Busytown. Dismantling huge stage rigs piece by piece and snapping shut folding chairs. Using leafblowers and a lawnmower-esque product called “the Billy Goat” to sweep up all the orange and blue paper clippings. (They can’t get every piece; on my walk to the subway later, I watch a man leaning over and bagging up a combination of dog shit and confetti that got caught in the grass.)
3:11 p.m.: I’m trying to meet up with one of my best friends from high school—the first person I text about anything Knicks; a guy with whom I used to enthuse about Eddy Curry and Kevin Knox—but he has already hopped a ferry back to New Jersey. I’m sad but also brimming with good-times vibes and a feral sense that anything will always be possible. “next year’s parade,” I text him, “u and me.”
4:08 p.m.: I stop into a hotel lobby to see about another friend, but she’s already gone. But, in this town, on this day, I’m not alone. In between ravenous chomps of some sliders, I compliment a gal sketching at the bar nearby on her Do the Right Thing jacket. “I like your hat,” she says in return. By the time I leave I have a new friend and a piece of her artwork as a keepsake. I don’t even think she knew it was my birthday, but the universe sure did.
“You know what I love,” Mamdani asked me earlier, “is that children are being born in a city where they think it’s normal for the Knicks to be NBA champions. That is a beautiful thing—that they grow up with a sense of this is what life simply is like.” I get how those babies feel. As far as I’m concerned, making rash decisions in a moment of midlife crisis can only lead to being overcome by happiness. Knicks in five, for life.
