Today, New York City celebrates its champions, as the victory parade for the 2026 NBA champion Knicks will be held in Manhattan. It will be the culmination of a two-month long stretch of play, the likes of which New York has not seen from any of its teams in any of its sports in quite some time, as the squad steamrolled their way through the playoffs en route to their first championship since 1973. And just about everyone—from the longtime fans who have suffered through years of heartbreak and pain to the newbie fans joyfully jumping on the bandwagon—has been swept up in the mayhem of the Knicks and their unlikely march into the history books.
That includes many of us here at Amazin’ Avenue. Joe Sokolowski used the most recent This Week in Mets Quotes article to write a heartfelt treaty about experiencing the highs of this playoff run with his father. I first wrote about the Knicks when they were on the verge of clinching their way into the Finals and I didn’t really want to write an actual recap of another crappy Mets game. Then, prior to the beginning of the series against the Spurs, I wrote a more serious piece bemoaning the inability of the other blue and orange team we focus on around these parts to achieve the same kind of extended success that we’ve seen at Madison Square Garden over these past few years.
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That latter article offered a somewhat more fatalistic outlook on how the success of the Knicks commented upon the failures (both new and old) of the Mets. And many of the feelings expressed therein are ones I still feel two weeks later. But now that the Knicks have finally reached the mountaintop, I think it’s only fair that I offer a culminating piece to this unofficial trilogy of mine—one that provides the more positive takeaway from all of this. Because if there’s one lesson I’ve learned from this Knicks run that I can take and apply to them, the Mets, and any other sports team that you or I may root for, it’s this: the pain and suffering is all worth it in the end.
I didn’t necessarily always know for sure if that statement would prove to be true. I speak as someone born in 1993, and I imagine my experiences mirror those of a lot of fans in my relative age range: those of us who were born too late to experience some of the great moments in our franchise’s histories, but also early enough that we have now spent decades of our lives waiting for our turn to finally know what it’s like to see our team win a championship. As a Mets/Jets/Knicks fan who has been consuming sports religiously for two decades now, the idea of actually seeing it happen has usually felt entirely unattainable, as the experience of rooting for my three primary teams was rooted almost solely in heartbreak. And when I allowed myself to dream about some distant future in which things actually broke our way for once, some part of me had to wonder: can the joy that I would experience in that hypothetical scenario actually make up for all the years I spent living with an entirely irrational level of stress and disappointment over the stumblings of these three teams?
Sure, I know the people who have actually gotten to see their squads win it all—including fans who are older than me and were around to see the 1969/1986 Mets, the 1970s Knicks, the 1968 Jets—would tell me that it would be worth it, but that was their experience; that doesn’t necessarily mean it would be mine. And of course, I would also think about the Red Sox and Cubs fans who lived full lives hoping that they would one day get to see their respective franchises’ curses lifted, the ones who died before seeing that dream realized. Some part of me had to wonder if I was destined to suffer a similar fate—not just for one of my teams, but for all three of them.
Well, the jury’s still out on the Mets and Jets, but as of June 13, 2026, I can now say that I have seen one of my teams win a championship. And I can now say that it was worth it. But I don’t really think that suffices. I think it’s important to really reflect on why it was worth it—because I think the specific reasons are different than what I might have imagined they would be when I first started watching sports as a 12-year-old boy and in the years to follow.
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Like many, most of my sports fandoms were originally rooted in the people around me—my grandmother instilled my love for the Mets, and my father cursed me with Jets fandom (incidentally, the Knicks are the one team for whom I didn’t really have that initial outside influence, but I certainly wasn’t going to root for the Nets when their games aired on the same network as the goddamn Yankees). Still, for a large portion of my life, these fandoms were largely an isolated experience, something that offered small and brief periods of comfort while dealing with the deepest throes of depression and isolation. We don’t need to linger too much on these dark years—this is supposed to be a celebratory piece, after all—but suffice to say that during these times, there wasn’t a whole lot to look forward to, and not many people to share victories and (mostly) defeats with. The dream of a championship from one of my teams offered a small but meaningful reason to keep going, to keep struggling through the rough times. It was a dream destination that made the trials and tribulations of the journey just a little bit more bearable.
Over time, this changed—thanks in no small part to this very site and its community. I met the woman who would become my wife while we were both anonymous posters in the comments section (and subsequently got to indoctrinate her into Knicks fandom). I made several other friends from this site and through my participation on it who would form such a large basis of my consumption of sports. I no longer lived and died by these moments alone—now I got to share the joys and sorrows with others. And that did fundamentally change my relationship with sports, and all for the better.
And lord, there has been so much of that shared joy over these past few months—and not just with my friends and family. Living in Washington DC, I have spent most of this Knicks playoff run outside of the city in which the magic was happening. While there were obvious drawbacks to that, there was also the advantage of coming upon other Knicks fans in foreign waters and having those brief moments of recognition and acknowledgement of these fellow travelers. A large group of Knicks fans congregated in a bar in Arlington, Virginia during these playoff games, with the number of attendees rising higher and higher as the playoff run deepened until both the inner and outer areas of the establishment were filled wall-to-wall in a sea of orange and blue. All of these expatriates—people whose lineage hail from the greater New York area, whose lives have brought them to an entirely different area of the country but who still represent their roots through their fandoms—came together and experienced the thrills of a Knicks championship run with the only people in our corner of the world who could truly understand what it meant. My wife and I got to see some of the most memorable highlights of the playoff run in this setting—from the Eastern Conference Finals clincher to the dramatic Game 4 comeback against the Spurs, culminated by a tip-in basket by OG Anunoby which will live right up with the Buckner error in the pantheon of all-time great New York sports moments.
But still, nothing could quite compare to experiencing the joy of Knicks mania in New York City itself—something my wife and I did get to experience this past Saturday, the day the 53-year drought officially ended. We journeyed throughout Queens early in the day in our Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart jerseys and screamed “KNICKS IN 5” at virtually every single one of the dozens upon dozens of people who were also geared up in Knicks attire. And then there was the game itself, which we watched at Fifth Hammer Brewing Company in Long Island City amidst a massive crowd of fellow fans. Like every single game in the Finals, it was a tense affair in which the Knicks spent most of the game down by a lot and needed to fight tooth and nail to come back. But when the final whistle sounded and it was all over? Utter pandemonium ensued. The loudest cheers I’ve ever heard in my life. Some people cried. Some people hugged. Some people took their shirts off. Some people did a combination of all three. I mostly just stood there with my arms held up and a huge, stupid smile on my face, not quite able to believe that it had actually happened after all these years.
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And later on, when we finally left to begin making the trek home, it was clear that the celebration was just getting started. Cars were honking. People in the streets were screaming and dancing. I took a selfie with a complete stranger. And when we entered the subway to head to Grand Central, the entire car was shaking with people cheering and banging the walls. The jubilation continued throughout our entire journey home, and it really hasn’t stopped in the days since then.
All of these moments—and countless more I don’t have the time or space to describe—were what made the wait worth it to me. It wasn’t necessarily just the vague sense of accomplishment one illogically feels when their team wins through no effort of one’s own—though that was there, of course. It was those communal moments of joy and connection, both with the people I already know and love and with the people I had never met before and probably will never meet again. It was the shared humanity that we all experienced, the feeling of being really and truly alive. Those kinds of moments are all too rare in life, and sports are one of the few things that are capable of giving them to us—particularly when the collective angst of a city is relieved through the end of a drought that many thought would live on forever. Mayor Zohran Mamdani perhaps put it best: “Oftentimes this kind of unity comes in moments of tragedy. And to see it coming now in a moment of joy, it’s something I’ve never seen before across our city.”
Right around now, someone reading this probably feels the need to remind me that, sir, this is a Mets website. And look: As meaningful as this Knicks championship was, and as much as I would love to one day see the Jets get there as well, the Mets have always been and will always be the team for whom I have the biggest emotional attachment. They are the Alpha and the Omega, and a prospective championship from them is my great white whale. New York City may never react as strongly to a sports victory as they did to this Knicks victory, but as for me, the Mets winning it all and ending their own lengthy title drought would give me a satisfaction that would know no equal. As fun as it was to convert my wife to Knicks fandom and experience their achievement with her, it would pale in comparison to being able to jointly celebrate a World Series victory for the team whose existence is the very reason we found each other.
And yet, there is still likely to be a journey of struggle and sadness to get to that point. There still exists the possibility that we may never get there. And many may still wonder if the wait will ever be worth that. But I personally will not wonder that anymore—because the Knicks showed me that it is. Whether you are just as big a Knicks fan as I am, an innocent bystander, or anything in between, hopefully you were able to examine what this team was able to accomplish for this city, and hopefully you came to the same conclusion that I did.
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