It Won’t Get Better Than This

Gotham's true heroes, its sanitation brigades, are still sweeping up the dazed, delirious, and confused bodies from the streets of the city, and the clean-up will take them well into this evening. Then they'll have to do it all over again Thursday after the obligatory semi-violent boozer disguised as a parade. These New York Knicks are finally done with being the Knicks of yore, and the city that has come to rely on them as a work in perpetual progress, regress, and occasional undress, has one less thing to rely upon as enduring truth.

That loss of identity begins after the parade, after approximately 50 gazumpty-skillion people clog and foul the streets of Manhattan to salute the logical inheritors of the crowns last worn by Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Harthorne Wingo, and Red Holzman. The half-century and change of often performative suffering has finally ended, and Knicks fans finally have a team worthy of their occasionally obnoxious hubris. Now they have to figure out what to do with it, and they are not reliable right now when it comes to figuring that out because they are still on the post-coital cigarette portion of their new journey.

They beat the San Antonio Spurs for the final time Saturday night, 94-90, to win the 80th NBA championship, and they did so in the most New York kind of way: by taking early body shots from the younger and springier Spurs and then clinically exposing San Antonio's collective naivete time and again. Through know-how, defensive pressure and new statue-in-training Jalen Brunson, they made the Spurs and allegedly indomitable centerpiece Victor Wembanyama grapple with and eventually submit to their own too-new-for-school demons. The Knicks had done the same things the same ways in Games 1 through 4, and the only reason they needed five games instead of the bare minimum is because Donald Trump attended the third.