I Got Locked Out After the Knicks Made the Finals

Last night, the New York Knicks made the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years.

Troy, the bartender at Baohaus, passed me a bottle of Veuve from the fridge and I told him to put it back because the job is not done.

It is incredible that we’ve made it this far, but we still haven’t won shit.

We need four more wins.

But I still wanted to remember the moment so I asked every one at the bar to come outside and take a group photo. This deep in a playoff run, it’s important to poke your head up and enjoy it for a moment before locking back in.

So we did.

Usually I’ll take an Uber home after 11pm, but tonight I called my best friend, Raf, as I walked to Astor Place to take the 6-train. We spoke about surviving the Eddy Curry era, suffering Harry Potter as our point guard, the Frederic Weiss pick, the Channing Frye pick, the Kevin Knox pick, the Frank Nkitlikina pick which I watched go down at Dallas BBQ on 1st ave, all the terrible picks, fuck them picks.

We are in the NBA Finals and it was worth it…

When you haven’t been to a finals in so long, you start to wonder if you ever will. The proposition feels impossible and that despair hangs over every thing in your life.

I will tell any long suffering fan, its going to be alright.

All those years screaming at the television blaming Dolan, Thibs, Carmelo, Charles Smith, Jon Starks, (I never blamed Patrick) or even at times Spike Lee, were misunderstood.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it simply wasn’t our time.

When it is your team’s time, the feeling of joy usurps all the suffering and you understand how all the learning moments culminated in this victory.

Apparently it was also my wife’s time because as I scrolled the 2015 Knicks roster looking at long forgotten names like Langston Galloway, Cole Aldrich, and Jason Smith, I got a DM about the photo I posted.

In a now deleted message from a blocked account, she informed me that I would be sleeping on the couch because the woman in the photo had her arm on me.