Midnight

The fairy tell ends, but this team's story is just beginning.

The magic is in the work.

Of all the Thibs-isms, this will always stand above the rest for me.

Why? Because from the day we’re born until the day we die, there is a frighteningly large percentage of our lives that are completely out of our control.

Who we meet. Where we’re born. Family. Health. Happenstance. The number of sliding doors moments in a single day can butterfly into an infinite number of possibilities, all of which carry with them their own separate timelines. The notion that we are in control of anything is the ultimate fallacy.

Except for what we bring to the table, and how hard we’re willing to work for whatever chances life throws our way.

Control what you control.

It’s another favorite from the head coach, and an offshoot of his more famous line.

Outside parties will do whatever they’re going to do, and just like in our own lives, we are at the mercy of fate. Sometimes your boss wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, and you’ll be the one to pay for it. Sometimes the driver behind you is busy checking their phone at the wrong time. And sometimes a team shoots 67 percent from the field in a do-or-die Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals.

Shit happens.

Sometimes, that shit is bad enough to have real consequences. Consequences that make us not want to get up out of bed the next morning. Consequences that make us reach for something trivial like sports as an escape from our unfortunate reality.

This team was that escape for so many people this season. People who had to deal with far worse luck than an injured All-Star, or a bad whistle, or rotation player after rotation player going down over the course of the playoffs alone. We’re talking real life, where the score doesn’t revert back to zero the next time you take the court. If there is even a next time.

To those people especially, but really to all of us in some small way, this was more than a basketball team. Much more. This was a symbiotic experience, where we felt connected to a group of strangers precisely because of how human they were - a rarity among professional athletes in modern times.

Like us regular folk, these Knicks did not have access to shortcuts, nor did they waste time looking for any.

They only knew the work.

It was the work that would set them free, the work that would give them a chance, the work that would make up for any bad luck that befell them.

They found magic in the work, and in doing so, made us believe in magic ourselves.

On Sunday, the clock finally struck midnight on this special group that made so many of us feel the way about a team that we have not felt in a very long time, if ever.

Momentarily emboldened by the return of OG Anunoby and inspired by a heroic effort from Josh Hart, it felt like the fairy tale simply had to have another chapter.

It couldn’t end here. Not like this, not to a team we knew was beneath us if we had just a little less bad injury luck and a little more gas in the tank. And not without Jalen Brunson, a real life Cinderella man who turned doubters into pumpkins at every turn, having something to say about it.

Alas, if he was going to have a final word, we didn’t get to hear it, not after he left the game with a fractured left hand late in the third quarter. Maybe he had one more impossible run left in him. We’ll never know.

That is fitting, in a way - ending a season that once carried so much promise with a five-man unit of Donte DiVincenzo, Alec Burks, Deuce McBride, Precious Achiuwa and Isaiah Hartenstein on the court, trying desperately to make a fourth quarter comeback.

Five players, none of whom were starters when the year began, and only two of which were in the rotation at the start of the season. They were the only healthy bodies left. Everyone else gave whatever they had to give, but ultimately joined a list of walking wounded that, by themselves, would have probably beaten this Pacers team if fully healthy.

In that sense, for as much as fairy tales have happy endings, this finale was far more appropriate for this group.

Except this wasn’t a fairy tale. Yesterday’s result proved as much. Fairy tales aren’t real. They’re stories told to little boys and little girls to ward off scary thoughts in the dark. They persist because everyone deserves an innocent existence, at least for a few years, before the harsh realities of life begin to set in, and you realize that the only fairy godmother you’ll ever have is the one looking back at you in the mirror, bleary eyed and beleaguered, hoping that all the effort will finally pay off.

Everyone wants a happy ending. Few ever get it, and those that do realize pretty quickly just how right Don Draper was when he asked and answered his most prophetic verse:

What is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness.

Perhaps that is why we gravitate to sports. Unlike life, for one team, every season, there does exist ultimate and incontrovertible victory. Champions, eventually, need more happiness, but the memories of those titles persist. Like fairy tales do for kids, they give us something to reach back and grab onto when we’re feeling down, or scared, or alone, or maybe just when we need a smile.

The 2023-24 Knicks’ season did not end in a championship. Maybe it would have if a few sliding doors (or a sliding Jaime Jaquez Jr., fuck you very much) had been timed a little differently.

It doesn’t change the fact that this team will always have a place in our hearts, which brings me back to where we began.

Sports, like life, is results oriented. People know the saying “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” but there’s a first part of that phrase that often gets omitted. It’s from Hall-of-Famer Frank Robinson, who started the now famous quotation off by saying that “close don't count in baseball.” Basketball isn’t any different. Tiger Woods put his own spin on it a few decades later, when he said that second place is just the first loser. As ringz culture gets more pervasive by the day, this mentality isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

So why, then, will these Knicks be gone but not forgotten?

Because the magic is in the work.

Every time I thought of these words, I’ve always thought of them as a roadmap. A means to an end. A mantra for results-oriented people who cared not for bullshit or excuses. The focus was on the conclusion, and not the journey to get there.

That is, until yesterday.

For nearly five hours on the KFS Postgame livestream, I read comment after comment that all had one word in common: Proud.

Proud of this team. Proud of these guys. Proud of their effort. Proud of how they overcome adversity. Proud of what they were able to accomplish against the odds.

Most of all, proud to be a Knicks fan.

That’s not something anyone would have said just five years ago. I’ve written about the organization’s growth since then, and how quick the turnaround has been, all things considered.

Never was that more apparent than yesterday, when in the aftermath of a 21-point Game 7 home playoff loss, all anyone could talk about was how much joy this team has brought them.

Not because of the end result, but because of the journey they took to get there.

That’s why the magic is in the work. Win or lose, trophy or no trophy, if you give everything you have and leave nothing on the table, the memories you make will be pure, even if the final outcome isn’t.

For months on end, we watched the most unlikely cast of characters do things that no one thought imaginable. Three college teammates, none of them lottery picks, led the charge. A career backup became indispensable as a starting center. Guys who were once out of the rotation entirely were later called upon to play 40 minutes a night.

The list of unlikely accolades got longer and longer.

And through all of those trials and tribulations, did the basketball ever suffer? Hell no. While the climb may have gotten steeper at times, they always honored the game by playing it as it was intended.

The team, the team, the team. Always about the team. Whatever the team needed, they gave, right up until yesterday, when they finally had nothing left to give.

But that’s not how we’ll remember them. Far from it.

The work they put in gave us so many magical moments, from Jalen holding back tears, to overcoming his injury in Cleveland, to five straight wins to close the season and grab the two seed, to the DiVincenzo double bang, to more Brunson heroics, to Hart’s series-winning three, to the gutty Game 2 victory, to the Game 5 onslaught and everything in between, they made us believe that midnight would never come.

That it finally has is sad, but not because it diminishes anything that came before it, but because it means we need to say goodbye.

I will try my best to do that this week, before the offseason begins in earnest and we turn our attention to the summer ahead. They deserve a proper send off. More than that, we need time to let go.

Sports don’t usually invoke this level of emotion. As a grown man, it is not lost on me that I give blood, sweat and tears for what is essentially laundry, as Jerry Seinfeld once put it. It doesn’t logically add up.

Then again, neither did these Knicks.

By any metric, their season should have struck midnight long ago. All they did was continue to turn back the clock.

How did they do it?

How else.

The work.

Best of all, the magic is only getting started. The foundation laid this year is solid enough to persevere for seasons to come. They learned what they’re capable of with one hand tied behind their back. Next year, they’ll return with a vengeance.

But that is a conversation for another day. For right now, we salute, and say thank you.

Thank you for the memories. Thank you for the enjoyment. Thank you for the distraction.

Most of all, thank you for reminding all of us why we root in the first place.

These Knicks made the impossible seem possible.

Their season is over, but that inspiration will live on in each of us.

And that is all any of us could have asked for.

🏀